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The Song at Sunrise 




The Song at Sunrise 


By 

WILLIAM RUSSELL OWEN, D. D. 

V ' 

Pastor, First Baptist Church 
Macon, Georgia 



New Yore Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 


London 


and 


Edinburgh 


Copyright, 1923, by 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



« « 
• • 4 


©Cl A711237 

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 

JUL19 ’23 

'VvS I 



p 




To the 

Princess of the Parsonage 
who every day blithely walks the 
Highway of Heaven 
these Addresses are Dedicated 


i 










FOREWORD 


T HESE Addresses, delivered from time to 
time before congregations in the South¬ 
ern States, represent an attempt to inter¬ 
pret the spirit and indicate something of the faith 
and fervour of the folk of the Southland. I am 
hopeful, moreover, that what follows may in some 
measure at least reflect the deep-seated reverence 
of a people of poetry and power, of child-like faith 
and tremendous conviction, who constitute one of 
the most profoundly religious constituencies to he 
found in all Christendom. 


Macon - , Georgia. 


W. R. O. 



Contents 


I. The Song at Sunrise . 

Exodus 14:24; 15:1,2 

II. Rainless Clouds . 
Jude, 12 

III. Limping to Glory 
Genesis 32:31 


11 

20 

30 


IV. The Highway to Heaven ... 38 

Genesis 28:12 

V. The Imperative of Power . . 48 

John 20:22 

VI. The Sparrow’s Scar .... 59 

Matthew 10:29 


VII. The Modern Master .... 67 

Acts 1:11 

VIII. The Plenitude of Power ... 78 

Luke 3:21 


IX. The Lyric of Old Age . . . .90 

Psalm 23 


X. The Consecration of Change . . 105 

Psalm 55:19; Proverbs 24:21 

XI. The Charm of the Unchanging . 115 
I Corinthians 14:8 


10 


CONTENTS 


XII. The Forgotten Princess . . . 126 

(For Mothers’ Day) 

Exodus 2:10 

XIII. The Hidden Host (Christmas Sermon) 135 

Luke 2:13 

XIV. The Survival of the Unseen . . 145 

(For the New Year) 

Isaiah 49:16 


I 

THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


“In the morning natch * * * Moses sang * * * 

the Lord is my strength and song.” — Exodus 14:24; 15:1*2. 

A FTER the midnight march, Moses sang a 
song of victory at the sunrise. Chris¬ 
tianity is the gospel of sunrise; it always 
offers to sinning man the charm of a second chance, 
the opportunity of a new start. 'No world religion 
arraigns sin and failure quite as severely as Chris¬ 
tianity; and yet, no system offers forgiveness as 
completely and fully. Christianity is the herald 
of hope to the disheartened, and offers a new bene¬ 
diction at every daybreak. 


“ Wail not for precious chances passed away, 

Weep not for golden ages on the wane, 

Each night I burn the records of the day. 

At Sunrise every soul is born again/’ 

Two million slaves trudged along over the weary 

ground for seven days, marching at midnight out 

of Egypt with a blind faith in God’s chosen man, 

Moses. A cloud flashed light before them at the 

midnight hour, and thus they marched in the cool 

of the night, but in the light furnished by God. 

ll 


12 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


Pharaoh followed in the darkness which trailed the 
escaping Children of Israel, and headlong and 
violently the Egyptians rushed into the soft water- 
beds of the Red Sea, and their chariots stalled and 
sunk and the midnight brought confusion and the 
resurging waters buried them deep in the bottom 
of the sepulchre of the sea. And “ at the morning 
watch, Moses sang, The Lord is my strength and 
song.” 

They had passed through the midnight to the 
morning; through the darkness to daybreak; one 
week before they had been slaves, but the song at 
sunrise marked out a new destiny and henceforth 
they were to be a Kingdom of Saints. 

The March at Midnight 

The midnight was trying. During the day sun¬ 
light was everywhere, and they rested and slept 
and the scattering herds grazed in waddy and in 
glen; but at the evening tide the summons came to 
march, to flee before the pursuing Pharaoh. The 
cloud gave them light, but where the cloud closed 
the midnight fell like a pall, ominous and threaten¬ 
ing. And that seems to be the way our God leads 
His marches. Jonah, disobedient and intran- 
sigeant, fled at right angles to the way of God, and 
after the midnight’s chastening, “ the word of the 
Lord came to Jonah the second time.” 

The vessel marred in the hands of the potter 
was set aside—in a corner obscure, forgotten by 



THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


13 


night and by day, useless, discarded and castaway. 
But a fresh thrusting in the waters for softening, 
a new brushing against emery wheels, and a second 
burning in the furnace, brought out the vessel, “ a 
new vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make 
it over again.” 

John Mark turned away into a midnight march 
when he left his missionary quest at Pamphylia, 
but a second chance came when Paul summoned 
him back to a morning song. 

God sets our journeys through the midnight 
oftentimes, to make our lives to be more useful. 
Israel’s pilgrims were learning that they were a 
nation petted and chosen by Jehovah, but His pre¬ 
paratory tutelage was to make them a useful nation 
to perpetuate Plis glory in the kingdoms of the 
world. As slaves they were useless, as a separated 
people they were to be the mightiest nation in all 
history to teach the righteousness of their Deliverer. 
We were not born to use the bounties of God al¬ 
ways, but we were born to be used of a gracious 
Saviour. 

Too often the soul wanders, helpless in its mid¬ 
night. Aimless, despairing and sinful the dark¬ 
ness falls over the spirit. A secret sin has wrapped 
its garments of gloom about a truant disciple and 
it is night to him—the Red Sea and enemies and 
the cloud behind—leave us useless and discouraged, 
but suppliant. 

It is not often the environment alone that defeats 


14 THE SONG AT SUNRISE 

us, it is the faithless, sinning heart within. Not 
difficult Nineveh offered the barrier, but Jonah’s 
heart was wrong; not the clay or the poor skill of 
the potter, but the rift in the vessel’s walls rendered 
it useless and unused. John Mark’s weakness was 
the sin that made him turn from his task. 

A storm is lashing its angry, rolling waves into 
the craggy coast of Scotland’s northern harbours, 
and a quivering boat feels her way through the 
jutting rocks to find a harbour. It is midnight, 
and “ the mad sea shows her teeth that night; she 
curls her lips and shows her teeth as if to bite,” 
and the helmsman prays, and the brave captain 
turns the tiller with delicate touch and anchours 
in the darkness, not knowing whither; but the sun¬ 
rise showed the story and the security and song of 
the safe voyage through a peculiarly dangerous and 
narrow passageway, and looking out upon the calm 
at the morning watch, the sea captain cried, “ Did 
we, did we come through that ? ” “ The Lord is 

our strength and song.” 

“The night is dark, hut God, my God, 

Is here and in command; 

And sure I am when daylight breaks, 

I shall be at the land. 

And since I know the darkness is 
To Him as sunniest day, 

I’ll cast the anchor,—patient—out 
And wish—but wait for day.” 

The Minor Music of the Sea 
How strangely was the passage through the sea, 
accompanied each step by the glory of God. Je- 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


15 


hovah was remaking a nation now. See them lean 
upon his powers to carry through the trembling 
walls of water. The sinking sands reminded them 
of the strength beneath their feet to hold them up. 

Jonah within the fish, found the solace of a new 
and simple trust. John Mark, tested, found a 
humble faith that sought the trail of service again 
where it had been abandoned. Jeremiah tells the 
tragic story of the potter softening the clay, break¬ 
ing the unused vessel anew, reshaping its pliant 
stuff with a reverent hand, blistering away with 
the emery wheel each rough and rude angle that 
marred the new vessel, and burning it with fire, 
fixing its body to transport water, to harbour a 
growing flower, to serve as a container of the olive’s 
oil; “ making it over a new vessel, as it seemed 
best to the potter to make it.” 

I know why the Red Sea and the minor music 
and the toilsome passage over crumbling watery 
sands, come to us; they teach us that having been 
driven to trust God in the testing hour, we come 
out never to trust ourselves again. 

Never a human life is finished until it ends at 
the grave, hut all the time our lives are being made. 
We are passed through the deep waters to give our 
faces a softness that only the background of a 
chastened soul can serve to show. The wheels whirl 
apace to grind away the asperities of temper, and 
dull the edge of our sharp words, and swiftly re¬ 
volve for the burnishing of selfish and unworthy 


16 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


ambitions to glisten in the rededication of a for¬ 
gotten self. Life is all a process, and the trying 
times are the best of all the experiences of the soul 
to fit us to sing the song when we walk out upon 
the shores of the new day, and greet the sunrise. 

Monica, that marvelous mother of Augustine, 
shed tears over the wayward sins of her son until 
her eyes were rivers of water. But with a concu¬ 
bine at sixteen years of age, and his illegitimate 
son, Adeodatus, to fix Augustine’s feet in the quick¬ 
sands of hopeless and dissolute youth, his mother’s 
prayers sang their song in the midnight ever about 
Heaven’s throne. And having heard Ambrose, the 
great preacher, Saint Augustine cries out in his 
confessions: “ Thus was I sick at heart and in tor¬ 
ment, accusing myself more bitterly than ever, 
tossing and turning in the frail bond that still held 
me until it should break asunder; frail it was, yet 
it held me still. I flung myself beneath a fig tree 
and gave rein to my tears; and the flood burst forth 
from my eyes, an acceptable sacrifice to Thee. And 
many things I said to Thee in this sense, though 
not in words. c And Thou, Lord, how long wilt 
Thou delay ? Wilt Thou be angry forever, Lord ? 
IIow long? How long? To-morrow, and to-mor¬ 
row? Why not now? Why not end my baseness 
this very hour ? ’ I grasped and opened the sacred 
volume, for a voice as it were of a boy or girl sing¬ 
ing many times: ‘ Take up and read, take up and 
read,’ roused me to read the words, 6 not in rioting 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


17 


and drunkenness—not in strife and envying; but 
put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no pro¬ 
vision for the flesh and the lusts thereof. 7 I neither 
wished nor needed to read more. For with the 
close of this sentence, the darkness of my doubt 
melted away. 77 

Through the Red Sea of Youth, guided by the 
cloud of Monica’s prayers, Augustine had come to 
the Song at Sunrise. A new beginning, a second 
chance, for at Augustine’s baptism by Ambrose 
tradition says first was sung the noble “ Te Deum 
Laudamus 77 —“ We Praise Thee, 0 Lord, 77 —my 
strength and my song. 

The Melody of the Morning 

Looking back on the quiet waters, midnight gone, 
Moses and Israel safely kept, he greeted the sun¬ 
rise with a song of a people having found a new 
freedom and a divine destiny. The Lord from that 
time forward, would be their strength and song. 
Israel had been baptized in the bounding walls of 
the sea, but they had come out born again; Jonah 
proven by Jehovah, rose a mighty prophet to 
Nineveh; the vessel broken attained a double 
beauty; John Mart rejected, was to be a partner of 
Paul’s greatest travels. 

A Christmas shower of Santa Claus’ bounties, 
brought to my older brother, years and years ago, 
a gaudily decorated magic lantern; and soon we 
were invited by a good old German deacon to visit 


18 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


his home for an exhibition. The sheet was hung 
for a curtain, and the petroleum lamp lighted, and 
the still life pictures were projected. It was a 
tame exhibit when we remember the marvels of the 
modem cinema, but the ending of the show came 
in a great tragedy; for behold, the lantern encir¬ 
cled by leaping flames, was afire. Presence of mind 
by the genial host, swept the burning wreck into 
a pail of water, and the gloom of failure filled our 
boyhood hearts. But a few weeks brought another 
invitation to the same home to see a new exhibition, 
and there on the marble-top table, arrayed in a veil¬ 
ing of white, was an object of curious scrutiny to 
our eager eyes. The veil was drawn, and wonder 
of wonders, there was my brother’s lantern in a 
dress of flaming red paint with golden designs of 
decoration, and written across its paneled door was 
the word “ Phoenix,” out of the fire! My brother’s 
magic lantern had been made over again. The sec¬ 
ond chance was a challenge to the magician’s art; 
out of the fire had come the Phoenix; out from the 
waste the wings of the fabulous bird had lifted a 
new creation, and the tuneless chords of boyhood’s 
disappointment had broken into a new melody, and 
in the morning watch we sang our song. 

Jesus, the great remaker of bruised hearts, sets 
a new light in the soul at every morning watch, and 
casts new garments of glory over the broken bodies 
of men. Every sunrise offers to men discouraged, 
a new opportunity; every day heals the scars of 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


19 


yesterday, and bids tbe pilgrim to start afresh. 
Every daybreak sings the song of a new begin¬ 
ning. 

At the morning watch Moses sang, “ The Lord 
is my strength and my song.” 


II 


RAINLESS CLOUDS 


“ They are clouds without water —Jude 12. 


HERE is nothing so tantalizing as the 
threat of an indolent cloud; ever promis¬ 
ing, hut never falling; always threaten¬ 
ing, but sending no showers; floating with a lazy 
indolence against the sky. Jude uses the waterless 
clouds as a figure to describe the fruitless indiffer¬ 


ence of the saints of the church; they were great 
in their espousals of empty doctrines, and profitless 
professions, and Christless creeds; but never re¬ 
freshing with the falling rain, and creating no 
balmy atmosphere by the scattering of good deeds 
and gentle works among the children of the 
world. 

Just away from the farmer’s cottage door there 
stretches on in radiant splendour the rows and rows 
of blossoming orchards of the peach and pecan, 
mingling their mantles of glory purpled and tinted 
with white. But the fanner now is observing the 
clouds, hanging by invisible threads, threatening 
their water, but ever disappointing. The leaves are 
crumpled and withering, the dust of the red soil 

caught in rolling gusts of wind, but the indolent 

20 



RAINLESS CLOUDS 


21 


clouds remain uncondensed. But Low wonderful 
is the rain and the imminent showers which some¬ 
times fall, and then the clouds become the harbin¬ 
gers of the ripening fruit! The last gasp of the 
hot breath of the rainless orchard sweeps before the 
coming storm into the fruit-gatherer’s face, the had 
spirit of the dry drought chokes him while the 
freshening winds release the strangling fingers of 
the departing heat-laden atmosphere and the clouds 
begin to drop their rain, and the scent of the fra¬ 
grant blossoms fill the air, and the dry earth is 
moist, and the roots are drenched, and the rain¬ 
less clouds have fulfilled their promise to the 
parching peachtrees and another miracle of a storm 
has brought its benedictions to the earth. 

And our lives are like the clouds. Such a har¬ 
vest awaits willing hands, and so many stifling 
slums watch eagerly for wealthy philanthropies, 
and the blight of drought which shrivels the souls 
of men patiently welcomes the busy ministry of 
useful lives to sweeten and refresh and transform 
the world by miracles of grace and goodness. 

The Disaster of Drought 

Nothing is so blighting to the tiller of the soil 
as the withholden rain and the consequent disaster 
of the drought. The panting sheep roaming the 
plains, and gasping for breath; the lowing cattle 
seeking the shrinking stream; the hot-sanded coun¬ 
try lanes; and withering leaves and stunted fruits 


oo 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


—all creation is groaning in the travail of the rain¬ 
less clouds and threatening showers and the blight¬ 
ing heat. Out on the prairies I saw a dwindling 
stream running its fugitive flight through the sweet 
grass and clover beds—a perennial supply to the 
luxuriant border of green on its either side, and 
here were two water oaks, one flourishing as a 
“ tree planted by the rivers of water/’ and the 
other tree uprooted by a rough wind and leaning 
like an aged man upon the virile branches of its 
companion tree, but still half green and still half 
rooted, pressing its hungry roots into the bosom of 
the running brook. Clouds somewhere had de¬ 
scended and had trickled down the hills and pene¬ 
trated the plains and had prevented the drought. 
Oftentimes, when a tree is dependent upon the 
clouds to water its roots, the botanist discovers a 
strange thin ring in the growth of the wood and 
the indelible finger of the drought has left its 
mark. 

But the careers of men too, hang like clouds, of¬ 
fering promise but never fulfilling. Which one of 
us does not recall the brilliant student of college or 
university, whose talents, like the clouds, gave proph¬ 
esy of a luxuriant life! What a charm of high in¬ 
telligence did this youth show to his classmates, 
what mighty success was expected from his flatter¬ 
ing abilities; but indifference or disinterest, or 
lazy effort, stimulated all the time the threat of 
fruitfulness or success, only to tantalize with its 


RAINLESS CLOUDS 


23 


unfulfillment; like a rainless cloud, his career was 
the threat of indolence. 

In the realm of home and church oftentimes a 
sweet and gentle life has caught the voice of God 
that called to duties and fields of endeavour far and 
away beyond the compass of the common place. 
“ She has offered herself for China and its Reli¬ 
gious Renaissance.” We have often said of this 
Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus, only to witness 
the resurge of the enthusiasm, only to see the soil 
grow dry and the life to dwindle and the care of the 
world and the hot light of the social glamour to cast 
upon this girl of promise the shadow of a rainless 
cloud, and with threatening indolence the world 
goes on unblessed and the hoped for benedictions 
are silent and unsaid in the disaster of another 
life’s deceiving drought. 

How much of loving usefulness and sweet minis¬ 
try did the Christian Hospital promise to a sick 
and wretched humanity until the mean hand of the 
mercenary healer drove out with the scourge of 
rushes the Spirit of Jesus the Great Physician in 
His unselfish and unrewarded healing of the hurts 
of the body. Like a rainless cloud the hospital may 
stand; ever promising its abundant benediction to 
body and soul, but through the miser’s greed, or 
the charlatan’s quest for patients ill of body and 
ignorant of guile, they stand as rainless clouds. 

The French Physician of the Children’s Hospi¬ 
tal rebuked that Christian nurse when she said, “ I 


24 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


pray for them each as my own.” ITis big rough 
hands and facile knife declared, “ All very well, 
but the good Lord Jesus has had Ilis Hay,” and 
hers was the reply: 

“Had? Has it come? It has only dawned. It will come 
by and by, 

Oh, how could I serve in the wards, if the hope of the 
world were a lie? 

How could I bear with the sights and the loathesome smell 
of disease, 

But that He said, “Ye do it to me, when ye do it to 
these.” 

The Sacrament of the Storm 
Christianity builds its program upon the prin¬ 
ciple of the falling showers, from the cloud that 
loses itself in refreshing rain, and the heavens 
yielding their bounty to a thirsty soil. What won¬ 
ders are wrought through the magic of a great 
(drenching storm; the soil is softened, the furrow 
turned and the seed wooed into life; the streams 
are swollen and the race to the mill is made the 
swifter and the grinding stones whirl and wheel 
and the wheat is ground and hungry mouths in the 
city slums are fed. Chubby hands reach out from 
the dingy cubicle of the hot tenement for the nour¬ 
ishing milk come from the luxuriant pasture 
which the storm has rendered lush and green; the 
venders on the streets crying the fresh fruit and the 
riches of the forest and farm, all of them, are sum¬ 
moned to busy benedictions and sweet charities by 
the miracle of the storm that has swept the earth. 
The toiler walks over his fields and orchards and 


RAINLESS CLOUDS 


25 


ranch when the threatening clouds are fallen. A 
sense of reverence deep and sublime, claims his 
loftiest worship for a moment, the growing grain 
pulses, the orchards fairly bloom anew with added 
charm of colour and the grass mellows into sweet¬ 
ness. The storm and the farmer and Jehovah have 
a common sacrament to supply the rich man’s bread 
line with its daily food. Neither heat nor cold, nor 
sun nor “ gloom of night,” hinders the storm and 
the toiler and his Heavenly Father from the abun¬ 
dance of the world’s daily provision. An humble 
prayer for the storm and the yielding clouds and 
the giving God, links the orchard grower and the 
wheat gleaner and the ranchman in a sacred fel¬ 
lowship with the God of the falling rain. 

“ Back of the loaf is the snowy flour, 

And back of the flour the mill; 

And back of the mill is the wheat and the shower, 

And the sun and the Father’s will.” 

Andrew Carnegie, with a romance of success that 
reaches from the heather beds of native Scotland to 
the steel rails of his busy mills, all the while stood 
in the peril of the threatening cloud, hut when old 
age had taught its wisdom; and the Carnegie pen¬ 
sions had fallen like showers upon the dreaded old 
age of his pensioners, and stately libraries had 
sprung up with their blessings in a thousand vil¬ 
lages, then the sacrament of the yielding clouds and 
the scattering showers had discovered worship in 
the distribution of wealth. 


26 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


The crude oil flowing through the miles of pipe 
lines suddenly flashes into the festival of lights 
above the student at his desk, the matron at her 
task and the city mantled in the dusk of the night. 
The gathering clouds of the indolent wealth fall in 
gentle benefaction and the program of Christianity 
finds its fulfillment in its usefulness to toiling men. 
For the threatening clouds of a man’s life find 
their strength when they fall. Jesus taught that 
he serves best who thinks least of himself; the sa¬ 
credness of service gains by giving, lifts by losing, 
becomes strong through stooping, blesses by bend¬ 
ing and finds itself supreme at the moment of sacri¬ 
fice. One’s life is discovered to be most useful 
when it yields its deeds of love and mercy. 

The Rainbow and the Reward 
The fallen shower, and the drenching storm and 
the sun’s reappearing and the rainbow write the 
entire drama of the faith which mankind has in 
God. We build our faith upon the promises of a 
providing Father, and the descending rain and the 
fulfillment of hope in the growing seed is the guar¬ 
antee that His loving care has not forgotten and 
the arching rainbow is the sign flung upon the 
heavens that His mercy changeth not through the 
years and years. Threatening clouds, and waters 
filling the earth with swollen streams and the pro¬ 
cess of the ascending vapour under the wooing of the 
genial sun, puts again in the sky the never ceasing 


RAINLESS CLOUDS 


27 


clouds and God and man walk along together in a 
divine fellowship of common toil. 

Raincloud and brook, and brook and raincloud 
again, is ever the cycle in which moves the way 
of God. Storm and rainbow, drought and harvest, 
so runs the fulfillment of man’s faith in his Crea¬ 
tor. The dry fields and panting herds and wither¬ 
ing blooms test the trusting natures of men who 
walk by faith, but never once has God disappointed 
the patient farmer who waited his provision; the 
rainbow in the sky is the unfailing sign that God 
and man have a work to do as old as the hills and 
as everlasting as the rocks and the running 
streams. 

The forms of nature change; sometimes a cloud 
with threatening indolence withholding its charm 
of shower now falls and through the circuit of capil¬ 
laries the orchards breathe out again the rain trans¬ 
formed into the invisible balmy summer air. Noth¬ 
ing is really new, but the habiliments of gray duty 
or of golden grandeur often change, and man goes 
to the grave having come from God and the opening 
sepulchres reveal to the heavens the fulfilled prom¬ 
ises of the risen bodies of the saints of God. The 
strange heavenly life of God enters into the human 
soul and processes of change come upon the heart 
and mind and the will of men and the glory of a 
kinship divine breaks out in the new-born life and 
takes the form of splendid service and teeming 
magnitudes of good deeds and kind acts proclaim 


28 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


again the miracle of the man changed and fash¬ 
ioned in the likeness of his Creator, the soul is 
horn again and the rainless cloud has fallen and 
the rainbow triumphs like an arch upon the sky. 

Lord Tennyson tells the story of the continuity 
of service and the passing of the spirit of consecra¬ 
tion from king to his subject in the dying of King 
Arthur, wounded, betrayed, panting to his death in 
the ruins of the chapel doorway. He calls to Bedi- 
vere, his faithful knight, and gives into his hand 
Excalibur, the sword which had been given him by 
the wondrous hand that rose out of the sea, and 
commanded that Bedivere cast it back into the 
loch. But when Bedivere had seen the hilt “ twin¬ 
kling with diamond sparks, and myriads of topaz 
lights, in subtlest jewelry,” he hid the sword in 
the rushes and returned to Arthur. 

“ Hast performed my mission which I gave ? ” 
asked the King. “ What didst thou see ? ” And 
Bedivere answered, “ I heard the ripple washing in 
the reeds and the water lapping on the crag.” 

“ Go again,” said Arthur, “ and cast the sword.” 

But once again Bedivere thought of the genera¬ 
tions that would like to behold the wonder sword 
of King Arthur, he again hid Excalibur among the 
rocks and returned. 

“ What didst thou see ? ” said the King. “ I 
heard the water lapping on the crag and the long 
ripple washing in the reeds.” 

And the dying and weakening king, angered, 


RAINLESS CLOUDS 


29 


flashed his last command, “ Miserable and unkind, 
untrue, traitor-hearted, if thou spare to fling Ex- 
calibur, I will rise and slay thee with my hands.” 

And Be diver e, summoning his best self with a 
mighty renunciation for his King, “ wheeled and 
threw the sword, which made lightning in the 
splendour of the moon, and whirled in an arch like 
a streamer of northern lights,” and returning to the 
King, he told the vision he had seen. 

Bedivere had taken up the task of the King. 
The King was dead; long live the King. The 
Church rises and falls only to reappear a thousand 
times the greater blessing to mankind. The cloud 
descends only to reascend, the life of God enters 
the souls of men to flash out again in glorious 
deeds and songs of melody and consecrations and 
renunciations and unrestrained surrenders, to find 
through the paths of useful services a new highway 
back to the bosom of God. 


Ill 


LIMPING TO GLORY 


“ As the sun rose upon him, he halted on his thigh .”— 
Genesis 32:31. 

O F course this is a picture of reconverted 
Jacob, limping on to Glory. Never again 
after he was touched by the wrestler at 
midnight did Jacob cease to halt on his thigh. His 
was a broken life, begun in a petty theft of his 
brother’s birthright, and closed in the tomb of 
Abraham and Isaac and his beloved Kachel—but 
the journey was a limp all the way. 

Exiled and guilty, and maybe contrite of heart, 
Jacob had seen the glory of heaven thrusting down 
its ladders in his dream. Fourteen years labour¬ 
ing as a shepherd, he had gathered wealth and had 
nearly stifled his conscience still uncleansed of 
Esau’s wrong. And now he is rallying his cow¬ 
ardly self to return home and face it all and maybe 
outwit Esau into a compromised treaty of peace, 
and Jacob discovers, strangely enough, that when¬ 
ever a man begins to right his wrongs, the first 
skirmish is always with himself. So the wrestling 
angel appears and goes to grips with Jacob and 
drags him away to loneliness and solitude and sor¬ 
row and himself. And the battle is cast! Jacob 

30 


LIMPING TO GLORY 


31 


and his challenging visitant fight it through till the 
daybreak. Safety for himself, Jacob for the mo¬ 
ment has forgotten. Hope for Esau’s easy forgive¬ 
ness is dismissed in the tragedy of a great repent¬ 
ance, and a new passion seizes Jacob to find the 
name and the deity of this wrestler that strangles 
his words, and throttles his songs, and beats blue 
his body and finally touches his thigh and leaves 
him crippled and panting in the shadows of the 
fleeing dawn, and says our text, “ as the sun rose 
upon him, he halted upon his thigh.” Jacob is left 
with a limp. He was transformed, transfigured 
and triumphant but doomed to limp on to glory. 
He had fled away a deceiver, he is returning 
touched with the Divine, he had left Esau a pre¬ 
tender, in the morning aftermath of battle, he 
stands a prince; failure had fruitioned into faith 
at last, but Jacob halted upon his thigh—limping 
in the glory of the early morning sunrise. 

The Trailing Limb 

There is no need to argue with any normal man 
that the human race wends its way to the city of 
God upon a halting thigh. Heaven has touched us 
all in our divinest moments and a struggle ensued; 
some of us took by violence the Kingdom of God; 
others failed; hut whether saint or sinner, every 
man is marked with the human limp. Let him rise 
to heroic deeds in war and he drags his bloodthirsty 
sword over the field of glory. If he sings the son- 


32 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


nets that seem to have winged their flight from the 
harps of heaven, some had moment in the poet’s life 
crashes him to earth with a broken wing, dust-soiled 
and bruised. Man bom from heaven forever scents 
the hounds of hell, a creature of light, he persists 
in walking in the darkness, made to mount up as 
an eagle he goes limping on to glory. 

In a volume of fiction which appeared a few 
years ago there was told the strange story of a wild 
recluse who sought the woods for his home, and in 
the huntsman’s and trapper’s life which he was 
compelled to live by chance he found a wildcat 
caught in a trap. He released the wildcat from 
its misery to discover a broken leg and a trailing 
limb. With mute appreciation of its liberator, the 
wildcat ever followed the steps of the wildman of 
the woods. But deftly and strikingly does the 
author weave into his story each movement of the 
wildcat as the companion of the “ trailing limb.” 
Healed was the leg, but hampered; cured, but crip¬ 
pled; mended, but marred. 

Witness Moloch rallying the defeated hosts lately 
fallen from heaven. He summons them to arouse 
their better self and win back their heavenly habita¬ 
tion ; a call to them to limp on back to glory! 

“ In our proper motion we ascend 
Up to our native seat, Descent and fall 
To us is adverse. Who but felt of late, 

When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear 
Insulting, and pursued us through the deep, 

With what compulsion and laborious flight 
We sunk thus low? The ascent is easy then. ,, 


LIMPING TO GLORY 


33 


So the race of man limps to glory in the sharp 
contention between Satan and the Saviour, between 
sin and salvation, out of the mire to the music of 
heaven. 

Sin is as pitiless as poison; insidious as disease, 
and ruins like rot; hates and hardens and hisses 
and hurts and hurls down to a heartless hell; scoffs 
and scorns and satires and laughs and leers and 
lures and lances and knifes and kills and damns 
and dooms and leaves man despairing and desolate, 
destitute and dead. 

But Grace saves and seals and sanctifies and sep¬ 
arates and makes superior; consecrates, cleanses, 
changes, cures and crowns with the coronet of a 
king; makes a pauper a prince, a prodigal a priest, 
and a castaway a queen. 

Grace sings a song when we sink; shouts a halle¬ 
lujah when we die, sweeps us in a golden chariot 
beyond the farthest stars through the gates of pearl, 
clothes us in robes of white, puts a crown on our 
head and sets man to stand before the throne of 
God a sinner saved and redeemed by the precious 
blood of Jesus, with all the capacities of the sons 
of heaven. 

The Triumph of the Wounded 

Even wounded, Jacob limped back to his brother 
and home and happiness. Left alone, man walks 
with his wounds on the level at best; finally dis¬ 
covering his path descending to ruin and wretched- 


34 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


ness and loss. But our evangel is the good news of 
the transforming life of Christ seizing the soul, 
glorifying the human into a nature akin to God—• 
divine and undefeatable. Jacob’s is the old story 
of the new nature and the soul’s new birth. The 
halting thigh is but a broken wheel of the human 
machine that sweeps on to glory as the chariot of 
the soul. Let man and God face each other at 
some midnight, in the flare of a blazing passion or 
in the miseracordia of a contrite heart, let the 
divine but touch him and man experiences the sun 
to rise upon him from the heights of glory and he 
limps on. Limping, halting, humanity, supported 
by the imperishable life of God born in the soul 
through experience, and tears and faith and yield¬ 
ing to the wrestling God, finds no heights uncon¬ 
querable, no task over which he cannot triumph, no 
withering wound that can hinder his walking the 
streets of God. 

Sam Iladley, the wreckage of a waste heap in 
the obscure alley of the big city, hears the voice of 
the evangelist, and in a tragic moment he wrestles 
with the midnight angel and the finger of his ter¬ 
rible habit of drink has touched for life his thigh 
to make it halt, the memory of the conquered habit 
remains as a pricking thistle deep in his heart, but 
Hadley has rescued his soul touched by the wrestler 
like unto the Saviour of Men and he limps into 
the glory of the Water Street ministry, reaching 
out with strong arms to lift and love the fallen and 


LIMPING TO GLORY 


35 


"broken bums of his city back to the ascent to 
heaven. Often, he testified, he would rise out of 
bed, during the most profitable years of his minis¬ 
try to follow the lure of the habit of drink—seek¬ 
ing in his disturbed sleep the closet where he had 
before hidden his flask and his cup. He often 
awoke in the act to find only the empty closet and 
the stingless habit and the halting thigh, limping 
to glory—changed and at the same time chained, 
fettered and free, a Prince with a limp. 

The mystery of this change in nature is a 
miracle. See the heap of coal dust black and dire. 
But the magic finger of the chemist calls out from 
the waste of dust, violet and indigo and blue and 
green and yellow and orange and red, and a rain¬ 
bow of colour like a halo, crowns the coal dust with 
glory; once again the chemist’s wand calls for 
aspirin and phenacetin and laxatives to leap into 
the healing medicine chests of men, and a sweet 
perfume of orange blossoms rises from the smoking 
oven and fills the air, while that great Magician 
of Time crumples the coal heap in his hand and 
presses it by avalanche and glacier into a hard 
pebble of white stone, and when the centuries are 
ready God opens His hand and the imprisoned sun¬ 
light flashes out of the polished facets of a pure 
diamond to charm the eye of man. Marvelous 
miracle of the coal heap, and of the sooted soul! 
Touched, transfigured, transformed, the lagging leg 
goes on limping to glory. 



36 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


Getting Home Without the Limp 

Fifty years longer was Jacob to limp. Then 
came Egypt and Joseph and the bedside benedic¬ 
tion to bis twelve sons, and sighing nnto death the 
old patriarch asked that they bury him in Mach- 
pelah, beside his beloved Rachel. At last the halt¬ 
ing thigh has reached its home where all weariness 
and limping cease, and thighs never halt. 

A halting thigh in glory puts on the immortal 
and incorruptible and the limpless. 

The persistent disciples, pilgrims, halting, 
maimed, and limping, go on to glory from strength 
to strength. Passing through the valley of weep¬ 
ing, they make it a well. The glory of the celestial 
is the divine far-off event that casts the garments 
of forgetfulness over the human limp. Cease not, 
oh man, to get your eyes on the spires of the new 
Jerusalem, their shining heights lure us out of the 
lagging pace, the disconcerting drag, the human 
ills, the weakening wounds, the tethering trials and 
hindering sins, which keep mortal men ever limp¬ 
ing ! The righteous man keeps heaven in view, but 
limps on to its happiness. 

Out of Doubting Castle, Christian and Hopeful 
beaten, stripped and wounded come to the river 
which is the river of death—wearied of the jour¬ 
ney, halting upon the thigh. 

Bunyan skilfully portrays the limping soul even 
in sight of the City of God, for he says: “ The re¬ 
flection of the sun upon the city was so extremely 


LIMPING TO GLORY 


37 


glorious they could not as yet with open face be¬ 
hold it.” Human nature drags on when in sight 
of its glory to find at last the struggle through the 
waters, and the voice of Hopeful cheering Christian 
on cries, u Brother, I see the gate and men standing 
by to receive us.” But Christian answers, “ It is 
you, it is you they wait for; you have been hope¬ 
ful since I knew you.” 

“ Then,” says the w T riter of Pilgrim’s Progress, 
“ I saw in my dream that Christian was in a muse 
a while. To whom also Hopeful added this word, 
“ Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee 
whole! ” And with that Christian broke out with 
a loud voice, “ Oh! I see him again; and he tells 
me, ‘ When thou passest through the waters, I will 
be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not 
overflow thee! ’ ” Then they both took courage and 
the enemy was after that as still as a stone until 
they had gone over. Now upon the bank of the 
river on the other side they saw the Two Shining 
men again—and a mighty hill, but the pilgrims 
went up the hill with ease because they had these 
two men to lead them up by the arms. 

On the other side of Jordan, instead of limping, 
they were leaping; the halting thigh had at last 
scaled the heights of heaven and the gray morning 
had broken into golden glory. 


IV 


THE HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN 

“ Behold the angels of God, ascending and descending — 
Genesis 28 : 12 . 

J ACOB was a lonely wanderer from liis home. 
He had stealthily stolen his brother Esau’s 
birthright and slipped away among the hills, 
barely out of sight of the black tents of Isaac. And 
in his weariness he watched the sun go down and 
Jacob groped out after God. That is always the 
first impulse to all prayers—the setting of the sun. 
When the night-times of life gather over man, our 
human hearts turn to heaven. The dream brought 
him a vision of a staircase leading to heaven, for 
that is what the original text means. Out of his 
piteous need the conscience-stricken Jacob sought 
for a highway to heaven, and found it in the vision 
of a staircase whereupon the angels of God were 
ascending and descending. 

The highway over which man makes his way 
from earth to heaven is precisely the same over 
which heaven makes its way to earth—it is none 
other than the highway of prayer. God prays to 
man quite as truly as man prays to God. The an¬ 
gels descend, as, indeed, they ascend. Prayer is 

38 


THE HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN • 


39 


not merely speaking to God; it is equally true that 
prayer is God speaking to us. Prayer is not only 
petition, it is also Divine response. When man 
prays lie closes his eyes, and maybe lifts his hands 
to the skies, but he who prays truly closes all of 
the soul’s windows, draws in the lattice, and shuts 
out every earthly thing. Prayer is the lifting of 
the soul’s far-seeing eyes to discern along the high¬ 
way which leads to heaven. Whether the eyes are 
closed, or the hands outstretched or the body bowed, 
only one thing is needful to travel heaven’s high¬ 
way—Jacob must kneel with beauteous contrition, 
with quiet, simple faith, and a sacred song of vic¬ 
tory on his lips. The soul must bow its head upon 
the cloth of gold that stretches—and not so far 
awav—until it reaches the throne of heaven. This 
is the highway over which man makes his way to 
heaven, and heaven accompanied by the very angels 
of God, returns* with a wise response to each peti¬ 
tion, a plenteous fellowship to each homesick cry, 
and a charge to set loose in this world of ours those 
many potentialities that our prayers set to moving 
about heaven’s throne. No soul travels over the 
highway to heaven to return alone. We pray to 
heaven—heaven prays to us. This is the fellow¬ 
ship of prayer. 

Mysticism is the one word among us that is most 
scandalized. It needs not be so. We have thought 
the mystic one whose mind is vague, whose heart’s 
cravings are feverish and who is turned quite 


40 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


easily by a wind-blown will. Mysticism is—in its 
simplest and most practical meaning—tbe habit of 
prayer. The mystic walks thitherward and hither¬ 
ward over the highways of heaven. Angels ascend 
and descend for the man who prays. 

Effective prayer is not simply the going into a 
closet and falling upon human knees, and counting 
beads, and saying words and beating breasts; it is 
the converging of all the experiences of the soul 
toward God, while the ever-present consciousness of 
a divine response gives the eternal hope of victory 
to him who praj^s. The mystic is always on the 
highway to heaven, maybe forwards, maybe return¬ 
ing. In every hour of the day and in the con¬ 
scious meditation of the night-time, the mystic 
either stands at the earth-base of the highway, 
wends his way to its summit, or flushed with a new 
sense of fellowship with God, turns earthward 
again. “ Prayer without ceasing,” is the attitude. 

Heavex Begixs Where Earth Leaves Off 

Jacob’s head found a stone as a resting place, but 
the lonely youth discovered the ladder to heaven 
started its lowest rungs where his troubled head lay 
on the earth. All of our prayers have their genesis 
in human need. The angels ascend first. This is 
the cry of an orphaned heart. One may travel ever 
whither, and he always finds man, and man has 
been found ever praying. To be sure in its initial 
emphasis, prayer means “ to ask,” “ to beg ”; but 


THE HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN 


41 


can one ask, except in tlie process of asking, lie re¬ 
ceive? “ Thou liadst not sought me,” says Pascal, 
“ liadst thou not known me.” Primitive tribes have 
"been found lifting aloft their hands for hours in 
silent prayer—not asking, but reflectively receiv¬ 
ing, through communion, through confession, 
through contrition, the stimulus of a divine re¬ 
sponse refectory and satisfying. This experience 
of the human heart, primitive as it may be, shows 
itself in the pilgrimage of the soul upon a highway 
which reaches to heaven. This is an aspect of 
mysticism, native to man, which cultivates its very 
potent sway over the life of man by what we call 
prayer to his God. 

Mysticism has ever been the foundling of theo¬ 
logical scandal, but the brave soul that adopts it to 
his bosom receives the fair compensation of know¬ 
ing undiscovered truths and an amplified experi¬ 
ence of fellowship with Jehovah. There is a form 
of mysticism found in Eastern religions which is 
the mysticism of the devotee, and manifests itself 
in fanaticism. From one form of hysteria or an¬ 
other this type of a false mysticism has gotten to 
itself distrust. But the most vital need of the 
Christian heart is to walk with God, to look into 
His shining face, to hear words inaudible to the 
ears of sense, and to lay hold of His invisible 
hands, and be led, as a father would lead the un¬ 
faltering feet of his own child of simple faith. The 
life of the true mystic thirsts for God, and he finds 


42 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


liis sought-for springs at the heavenward goal of 
this highway, and these springs prove the source 
of all healthy religious energy and sustaining grace. 
In the spiritual attainments of Zoroaster, the Per¬ 
sian ; of Moses, who endured as “ seeing Him who 
is invisible;” of Socrates, the prophet of Greece; 
of Augustine, the father; of Francis, the sweet 
spirit of Assisi; and, pre-eminently, of Jesus, the 
Nazarene, the world has the witness of great souls 
that walked over this highway of prayer,—moved, 
prompted, indeed called by the magnificent need of 
their souls which they discovered could be answered 
fully by God. 

It is quite common in our day to consider it ex¬ 
travagant to suggest that the soul of man has any 
secrets which lie beyond our understanding, and 
yet Jacob saw the angels going on, intuitively, 
ascending. The universal craving of the human 
heart goes out over the highway. The life of 
prayer is laughed out of court by many who assume 
the contemptuous and amused attitude of the sys¬ 
tematic and rationalistic thinker. But so unavail¬ 
ing are the efforts of the purely intellectual, and so 
unproductive is cold rationalism to reach any solu¬ 
tion of a life that has the daily experience of hav¬ 
ing uninterrupted need of his God, with a corre¬ 
sponding response to this need, that this age has 
no answer to make to the thesis that the soul is 
possessed of qualities by which it can and does ap¬ 
prehend the supernatural. 


THE HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN 


43 


The sphere of the soul transcends matter-of-fact¬ 
ness. Surely man would not be worthy of his 
splendid mental, and sensuous, and physical experi¬ 
ence, did not the soul have experiences that go far 
beyond our daily wisdom and the majestic delights 
of the terrestrial life of man. The realm of the 
soul lies along the highway of prayer, wherefrom 
the blazing flame of heaven kindles its inward 
light. 

Heaven Bends to Every Troubled Heart 
When the angels told the story of Jacob’s 
troubled heart and restless head, Heaven whispered 
back an answer. The angels descended over 
heaven’s highway. The God-sent angels hear hack 
responses in God’s way and in God’s own time to 
every prayer. Man in his prayer to God is taught 
that there is a real relation between his human need 
and the divine supply. In the return of the angels 
—God’s response—we soon learn that prayer re¬ 
lates us to the supernatural just as the bodily senses 
relate us to the world in which we dwell. Through 
prayer the soul is led to divine the spiritual in the 
drudgeries and humdrum experiences of life. The 
Christian mystic does not have partial and occa¬ 
sional experiences, horn of some unusual and fan¬ 
tastic experience, hut he is ever a pilgrim of 
heaven’s highway, and thus, however feebly at 
times, holds himself in constant communion with 
the divine. 



44 


THE SONG AT SUNKISE 


The soul must be bom again, says Jesus, but the 
soul moves on successively growing into larger at¬ 
tainments and unto the highest experiences. a We 
can thus be bom more than once,” says Maeterlinck, 
“ and at each of these new births w T e draw a little 
nearer to our God.” God answers prayers not sim¬ 
ply to grant what we ask or to supply what we 
barely need, but also to teach us how to grow in 
our spiritual life. 

It was because the angels descended that Jacob 
saw the Lord standing above the ladder, Jacob was 
in conflict with himself. His supremest desire at 
this moment was to clarify his sense of God and to 
disentangle himself from the dishonesty, deception 
and the unfair treatment of his brother, Esau. The 
angels were descending and thus whispering to this 
broken-spirited dreamer, this lonely-hearted seeker 
after God, that God understood and God would 
right all his anxieties. 

Jesus very intensely stimulates the hope within 
us that we can know the meaning of the heart’s 
strange and bitter conflicts, and that through a com¬ 
panionship with Himself initiated in prayer, we 
can enlist the sympathy and fellowship of the 
Father. “For he that hath known the son, hath 
known the father also.” Thus by prayer we learn 
that the great inter-related worlds of sense and 
spirit have yet in their proper understanding, vast 
rooms of newer knowledge and hidden glories. 


THE HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN 


45 


God and Man Meet on the Highway 

In His moment of triumph Jacob saw the angels 
ascending and descending, earth and heaven meet¬ 
ing; God and man walking over heaven’s highway 
in fellowship. The initiation of sinning Jacob’s 
prayer lay in his need of a forgiving God. But 
his reward came richly in a renewal of his sense 
of kinship with Jehovah. The descending angels 
reanimated the drooping Jacob. God has made us 
in His own image, and it is by that subtle recogni¬ 
tion of the soul that we are still in the process of 
being made that aids man to pray. We cannot set 
out stakes and say that human nature can come 
thus far and no farther. The potentialities and 
possibilities of man become infinite in the light of 
the Light of Jesus. The soul of Jesus, like an un¬ 
tenanted child, ever lived as in actual possession of 
Jehovah. So the intuition of the God-made image 
in man seeks always its great kinsman. 

Who would deny to the confused worshipper who 
bows in prayer, the assurance that when his heart 
cries out to the Ineffable One to answer his dis¬ 
tressed cry, that then angels come assuring the 
timid soul he may know perfectly the God that 
standeth at the top of the ladder, all and in all ? 

Psychology takes cognizance of intellect, will and 
feeling as the faculties which are the husbandman 
gathering the fruits of all knowledge for man, but 
there is yet a vineyard of spiritual truth which can¬ 
not be invaded by any of these faculties alone. The 


46 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


mystic recognizes that when at prayer the intellect, 
the will and the emotions interplay, all the gate¬ 
ways of the vineyard are opened wide. The spirit 
of God speaks to each so subtilely, yet so simply; 
so comprehensively, yet so specifically, that while 
at prayer the soul combines all its faculties that it 
might come into possession of the knowledge of the 
spiritual and the divine. When praying we do not 
expect simply that our hearts he filled full of the 
love of God, nor our minds to be illumined, nor 
our wills to he surrendered. There is yet an ex¬ 
perience far and away beyond indeed all of these 
combined—it is the conscious communion with a 
spirit, even our Father in heaven. We walk with 
God, unafraid, serene, confident, possessing a con¬ 
scious fellowship with Jehovah. Two souls have 
met and answered each the other. Whenever the 
element of spontaneity in intellect, will or feeling 
abounds in any psychic process they may take, as 
the worshipper walks with God, the mystic’s claim 
of “ knowing God without intermediary, and as it 
w 7 ere face to face,” has won its victory. At prayer 
the soul has communicated with God. So Jacob 
cried, “ surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew 
it not.” 

Two disciplines are necessary to one who engages 
in the practice of prayer. The discipline of self 
as it relates to his own moral conquest and the dis¬ 
cipline of self as it relates to the world in which 
he lives. How much the moral tutelage of the in- 


THE HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN 


47 


dividual enters into an acquaintance with God we 
cannot well determine. The crafty Jacob, while at 
prayer had evidently experienced a real repentance 
of heart. He made a vow to a better life. This 
discipline of self must be present in any attempt 
to have knowledge of the altogether Holy One. “ If 
I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not 
hear me.” It is certainly true that the mystic 
must buttress his real attainments in spiritual 
things by well-balanced moral disciplines, and these 
moral and spiritual disciplines of oneself, if per¬ 
sisted in, will bring their own reward. 

Tired-hearted man after all seeks to know God. 
The 'Christian mystic’s first impulse to this actual 
knowledge is a recognition of his inherent need of 
God. Trust in Jesus, His Son and disciplinary 
fellowship with Him, is the process toward man’s 
sublimest conception of Jehovah Himself. The 
initial step toward the shining throne room lies in 
a recognition that God is accessible and will make 
Himself abundantly manifest to man. The high¬ 
way over which he comes to his knowledge is 
prayer. Let the pilgrim who walks the highway to 
heaven ever know that the first step on the highway 
lies at the place where the highway touches earth. 


V 


THE IMPERATIVE OF POWER 

“Receive ye the Holy Spirit — John 20:21. 

T HE imperative challenge in the Kingdom 
of God in this twentieth century is not 
for more people; nor is the challenge for 
more pocketbooks, greatly mistaken as we may have 
been in forcing that issue; nor for more personal¬ 
ity, as mighty as it may be; hut the imperative chal¬ 
lenge to the Kingdom of God in this, our day, is 
for more power. 

It is quickly assumed to he a hard thing to tell 
what we mean by power; hut if it is easy to under¬ 
stand that Jehovah, the Creator, the Provider, the 
Father, gathered chaos in his hand and flung it 
into a surpassing universe of cosmos; or if it is 
easy to understand that Jesus came as the Mes¬ 
siah, and by His gentle gift upon the Cross, capti¬ 
vated the heart of the human race by flashing upon 
its understanding the simplest and yet the pro- 
foundest experience, that Jehovah is a loving, for¬ 
giving Father, it is equally easy to understand that 
the Holy Spirit is a Person inherent, resident, irre¬ 
sistible, causative, and imperative, and all the life 

of the soul has its genesis, tutelage and fullness by 

48 


THE IMPERATIVE OF POWER 49 

the Holy Spirit, whose habitation in the heart is 
power. 

Power is the Holy Spirit of God in the soul seeking 
expression through the processes of the heart, mind and will. 

The Hew Testament calls out to us, “ Be ye filled 
with the Spirit/’ summons us, “ to live in the Spirit 
and walk in the Spirit.” “ To speak not with en¬ 
ticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstra¬ 
tion of the Spirit and power.” It reminds us that 
we sing with the Spirit; it declares that “ the love 
of God hath flooded our heart by the Holy Spirit,” 
and that the fragrance, and bloom and fruitage of 
life is the normal expression of the power of the 
Spirit within the heart, seeking the flowering of the 
spiritual life in qualities of unusual service. 

The Church needs to learn, not so much “ to organize, as 
to agnonize.” Not alone to become more extensive, but more 
intensive. 

/ 

To underwrite its program with prayer. 

To inspire its purpose with power. 

To vitalize its vastness. 

To be filled with the spirit. 

Activity Differs Much From Receptivity 

We have so striven as disciples of our Master 
to keep up with the increasing schedule of activi¬ 
ties of the church in this, our day, that we have 
forgotten how to take time for the receptivity of the 
Holy Spirit and power. 

While we lengthen the stakes of our tabernacle 
and enlarge the circumference of the Kingdom, 


50 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


make loud noises with our hammers and saw and 
planes, we are passing daily, hourly, to and fro 
before a closed door, an empty room, the closet of 
prayer, the secret house of personal devotion and 
power. Fellowship neglected, a fruitless life, fail¬ 
ure in intimate friendship with Jesus Christ mean 
faithlessness in putting first things first. 

Does not a trumpet note, now and then, warn us that by 
the multiplicity of an external doing of things we are over¬ 
looking the inner springs of power? 

The imperative of Jesus calls us to receive the 
Holy Spirit—and power. We receive the Spirit 
as a mother’s heart receives its gentleness of love; 
we receive the Spirit as a ship’s sails receives the 
sweep of the winds, as it is driven before the gale; 
as the storm receives the fullness of the rain; as a 
furnace melts with the blast of fire; as the olive 
receives the infusion of oil; as the green grass 
gathers its freshness from the falling dew; as the 
marsh is filled full bv the tides of the sea. 

t/ 

“ How still the plains of the waters be, 

The tide is in his ecstasy, 

The tide is at its highest height— 

And it is night. 

But I would I could know 
What swimmeth below, 

When the tide comes in. 

On the length and the breadth of the 
Marvelous marshes of Glynn.” 

Tiie Potential of Power 
Not in the storm, but in the stillness came 
Elijah’s power. The heavens circuiting amid the 


THE IMPERATIVE OF POWER 


51 


magnificence of powers unmeasured yet by man 
roll on with their silent song. 

Often in my boyhood’s home in “ Old Vir- 
ginny,” I would leave my field of play and gaze 
with wonder at the big flying wheel of the city’s 
powerhouse. Entranced I would stand and listen 
to the whirling anthem of the wheels of industry, 
but never a sound was heard, and only the churn¬ 
ing and crooning of the trolley car pulling over a 
hill, or the scattering lights that spangled street 
and parlour demonstrated to me how the source of 
all the power lay in the big wheel, quietly whirring 
its way to release the electric current. 

Once two of us who played side by side made an 
actual telephone. A bar of tempered steel thrust 
against the dynamo for magnetizing, a tintype pic¬ 
ture cut in a circle, an induction coil, a wooden 
pill box, set carefully upon a hollowed broom 
handle, the stringing of wires, and miracle of boy¬ 
hood’s magic hands, my friend and I talked over 
spaces with our voices. But the years have taught 
me to set the potential of the telephone back to the 
quietly revolving fly-wheel. 

A friend told me how he sat beneath a waterfall 
in the Island of Jamaica, where the little basin 
formed in the mountains was a favourite retreat 
for those who loved to be awed by God’s spilling 
His waterfalls over the high precipices, which 
seemed sometimes to reach to the walls of paradise, 
and so loud was the tumbling water reverberated'^ 


52 


THE SONG AT SUNKISE 


through the narrow glen, that he shouted into the 
ear of his companion by his side, “ Isn’t it quiet 
here ? ” There is a stillness which may be dis¬ 
cerned amid the hot confusions of cur daily tasks. 
The potential of quietness tells the method of the 
power of the Holy Spirit in a life. 

One of the most beautiful figures to illustrate the 
silent strength of God’s Spirit in the life of man 
lies in the transpiration of the trees. 

“ I think that I shall never see 
A poem as lovely as a tree. 

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed 
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast. 

A tree that looks at God all day, 

And lifts its leafy hands to pray. 

A tree that may in summer wear 
A nest of robins in her hair. 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain, 

Who intimately lives with the rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me, 

But only God can make a tree.” 

The process of transpiration is the method by 
which the leaves of the tree breathe out the balmi¬ 
ness of a day in June. Up from the roots through 
the capillaries to the remotest fibre of the leaves 
and fruit the tree goes on lifting daily sometimes 
a half a ton of water, and a birch tree with two 
hundred thousand leaves is busy with every leaf 
all the summer-time. 

But Niagara roars, foams, leaps and falls, spill- 


THE IMPERATIVE OF POWER 


53 


ing five hundred thousand tons of water each min¬ 
ute to the rapids below, and no wonder we gaze 
upon such power that is used to light the streets 
of Buffalo and Niagara and maybe a score of other 
cities. But quietly the ten million far-famed peach 
trees of the State of Georgia lift annually by 
transpiration an equal volume of water as falls over 
the ledges of the mighty Niagara each day. 

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. 

The Imperative of Initiative 

The Spirit of God is to he received—and power 
comes with reception, but the scriptures teach us 
also that, “ If ye being evil, know how to give good 
gifts to your children, how much more will your 
heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that 
ask Him. 7 ’ We may quench the Spirit and strangle 
power, we may grieve the Spirit and lapse into 
weakness. The forces which do violence to human 
nature and often grip a man’s soul and bring him 
through a new birth into a spiritual Kingdom and 
register him as a citizen of a heavenly race, are 
none other forces than the regenerative processes 
of the Holy Spirit of God made available by a 
humble faith in man’s Redemption through the 
Blood of Jesus of the Cross. 

The power of the Holy Spirit is invisible, imponderable, 
impalpable, but imperative. 

“ Except a man he born of the water and of the 
Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of 


54 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


Heaven.” “ Ye are not in the flesh, but in the 
Spirit if so be the Spirit of God dwell in you.” 
“ Receive ye the Spirit by the works of the law 
or by the hearing of faith ? Are ye so foolish ? 
Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made per¬ 
fect in the flesh ? ” “ Seek ye first the Kingdom 

of God. The Kingdom of God is not in word, but 
in power. Ye shall receive power when the Holy 
Spirit is come upon you.” 

The Spirit called us to power when you and I 
looked for the first time with understanding into 
the face of a suffering Saviour; the Holy Spirit 
called us when our baby died and the Comforter 
came; the Spirit maketh intercession for us in 
every experience of temptation, “ the Spirit striv- 
eth against the flesh and the flesh striveth against 
the Spirit so that ye cannot do the things ye 
would.” 

I call upon you to receive the Holy Spirit, seek 
an imperative initiative in realizing the resource 
which is already yours, cultivate the gift, develop 
the wealth, utilize the power by which you will be 
enabled “ to do all things through Him who 
strengthened (empowereth) you.” A man is made 
a Christian by the Holy Spirit and developed all 
through his sainthood by the self-same power. 

The power of the divine life throbbing and puls¬ 
ing through the disciple of Christ comes as you and 
I yield to the illumination, the leadership and con¬ 
trol of the Holy Spirit and the life of submission 


THE IMPERATIVE OF POWER 


55 


warrants a life divinely directed to tlie highest 
goals of usefulness and fullness. 

Every community has its “ horn fiddler.” Us¬ 
ually he is counted the genius of the countryside, 
and his flashy and jerky snatches of the popular 
airs and familiar ditties are the marvels of all his 
neighbours. Every frolic finds him the favourite, 
and at every festival he is the craze. And the same 
community, oftentimes, has a demure and gentle 
lad whom they patronizingly call William Smith, 
just an unnoticed lad. And some great day of 
awakening finds William Smith announcing an am¬ 
bition to become a master violinist. The neigh¬ 
bours are amused and the initiated are bored by the 
pretensions of the obscure boy. His frightened 
face and shy manners and curling hair represent 
to the friends of his family a nice little lad, but 
not a mark of genius shows itself to them, at least 
not the genius of Uncle George, the fiddler with 
music born in his soul. 

William Smith passes, in time, through the 
school, on to the conservatory of the great city. 
During the first long tedious twelve months he 
spends in studying the muscles of the wrist, the 
possibility of touching lightly and the genius of 
gripping the strings to their supremest tension. At 
the close of the first year William Smith returns 
to his village to hear Uncle George, still in the 
center of the stage, strumming away at the same 
old tune. Another year the growing lad gives to 


56 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


instruction in the technique of the violin; he breaks 
to bits and reconstructs instrument after instru¬ 
ment, to discover the finest resonance. He spends 
one month on the theory of the violin string ten¬ 
sion, another period he toils over the theory of 
music, the range of tone values and the colourings 
of sounds; he lives a while in the biographies of 
the great masters; grows to know the classics of 
violin and harp through the centuries of song until 
his hand and brain merge out of youthhood to man¬ 
hood’s flush meridian. Another year the student 
now with wondrous eyes returns to hear again the 
praises of Uncle George as he a shakes the feet with 
irresistible spell ”—playing still the same old 
changeless, though maybe a captivating tune. 

The third year the school of the masters finds 
William Smith revelling in the delight of the 
artist whose calling comes to its glory. Aria after 
aria he masters. Sometimes the tones of a thunder- 
girted storm sweep over the sighing strings; now a 
zephyr as gentle as an angel’s caress bears the “ scent 
of hay-fields and summer rains” to the homesick 
heart of the musician now sighing for the summer 
joys of his home left long ago. The lad has grown 
to be a genius, full and complete in the mastery of 
string and bow and melody. And then he returns 
to his family and over in the great hall of the vil¬ 
lage his expectant, doubting neighbours gather for 
William Smith’s concert appearance. First he cap¬ 
tures the dozen best music lovers of the company 


THE IMPERATIVE OF POWER 


57 


by the faultless rendering of the most difficult of 
the trying classics: they nod to one another that a 
genius has come out of the village to bring them 
fame. Song by song, sonata by sonata, berceuse 
after berceuse—one upon another flow on in sweet 
charm upon the stirring and fascinated emotions of 
the common crowd and the triumph of the artist is 
all but come—and then—the night closes with the 
violin softly crooning “ Home, Sweet Home/’ by 
the lad who came back to his own people. 

The crackling of the logs on the fireplace with 
the cheer and warmth of the flames; the lullaby of 
a mother singing her child to its night’s repose; 
the father’s reading the forty-sixth Psalm at the 
family altar; the whimper of a sick little girl; the 
laughter, and joys and charm of a Christmas morn¬ 
ing lilting out of the Stradivarius, vibrating with 
the glowing soul of the master musician; all, all 
have contributed to summon the bursting applause 
to herald William Smith as the matchless master 
of the violin. 

Mind you, Uncle George still is playing, still is 
playing the same old changeless tune. Both were 
possessed with the same gift in the beginning of 
childhood, and Uncle George, following nature’s 
easy lanes, walked about in the unenlarging cir¬ 
cumference of his early genius; while William 
Smith toiled and strove and sought, and found the 
wings of the muse by which he soared to the heights 




58 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


of God and caught the charm of angel’s songs heat¬ 
ing themselves out of the harps of heaven. 

The disciple who unceasingly keeps to his task, 
who daily exercises the grace of serving his fellow- 
man, and looks through the skylights of his soul 
fresh each day upon the face of God, will find an 
expanding spirit and a potential of spiritual power 
undreamed of in those first days when God called 
him to exercise the gift of life eternal. 


VI 


THE SPARROW’S SCAR 

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of 
them shall not fall on the ground without your Father ”— 
Matthew 10:29. 

S ORROWS are the supreme opportunities of 
the soul. The great souls of earth have all 
suffered. Rone has grown great who has not 
grieved. Light-hearted youth laughs, hut only 
great hearts can smile. Sorrow is the master- 
culture of the soul. 

Just opposite my study window in Rew York 
City there opened the vista of a charming park. 
On a blustery day in March a brown shadow fell 
headlong from the trees to the mud of the city 
street below. The wind-swept rain had caught a 
sparrow and beaten its wings against the danger¬ 
ously charged trolley wire. The injured bird was 
baffled on the blocks beside the roadway. At first 
the sparrow seemed to play in the joy of rustling 
its wings beneath the damp crust of dirt, hut its 
struggles and more faintly spreading wings chal¬ 
lenged me to visit the fallen bird, and I found it 
dead. The high and rough winds, the drenching 
rain, the legions of heaven’s lightning harnessed in 
the trolley wire, the sunshine of forests primeval 

stored in the coal of the powerhouse, the chemistry 

59 


60 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


of the centuries—all had flung with violence the 
vesper sparrow to the ground, overwhelmed in 
death. No winging mate nor fancier of birds nor 
other eyes than my own saw, and none at all cared 
for the fall, except the sparrow’s Sponsor. His 
eyes were watching. Never a sparrow falls to the 
ground without your Father. 

The Sparrow's Sponsor 
Men still are asking the old, old question, “ Does 
the Father of men and of the gentle Jesus send all 
this trouble to us ? ” “ Why does pain ceaselessly 

pursue its punitive path ? ” “ Why must tears and 
losses and broken hopes come to an otherwise happy 
world?” Well, a light answer to all these ques¬ 
tions is that our phrases are wrong. Perhaps the 
Father does not send trouble. Maybe He does not 
permit trouble, but our Father controls it. He bal¬ 
ances the Pleiades, and He numbers the hairs of 
the head, and no sparrow falls without your Father. 
The firmament and earth’s foundations, the depths 
of the sea and the world of winds are under the 
will of the sparrow’s Sponsor, and no less directly 
and none the less really does He watch the cosmic 
universe than He fathers the sparrow’s fall. The 
Father sees the falling, hut He does not stay the 
fall. The sparrow falls—that is the way of sor¬ 
row. Never a tear or a tragedy, never a wound 
or a withered hope, hut the Father’s eyes see, and 
His purposes control. 


THE SPARROW’S SCAR 


61 


The reason why all this troubled earth has sor¬ 
rows, came to me to-day with a clear answer. The 
streets of our saddened city on this Sunday are 
silent, save for the clang of the ambulance bells, the 
rumble of the carriages of death, and the swift 
couriers of healing physicians and ministering 
nurses. An epidemic has seized upon the city’s 
life, and churches have been closed. Worshippers 
gather in their homes and pray and sing and serve 
in quiet confidence with the Watching Father. 
Somehow to-day the city is awakening to the 
presence of God. That is my answer to the prob¬ 
lem of pain—the souls of men have no teacher but 
sorrow. Books teach the mind. The common ex¬ 
perience of laughter and love and life tutor the 
heart. The will learns slowly, if it learns at all, 
but great souls grow only through sorrows. Jesus 
wept because men did not see that the body is but 
the home of the soul, and a weeping Christ will 
never dry His tears until the sons of men under¬ 
stand that the life of the soul is the supreme quest. 

Have you just separated from a fallen sparrow? 
Are nearly beaten out its wings? Have your eyes 
been filled with tears that come from the failure of 
hopes? Has the silent bruise of death stilled and 
stunned your faith ? Take heed, friend, for the 
Father watches the falling and the fall and the 
faith, and He is whispering to the soul. 

It was a drear day in August, and it was rain¬ 
ing. I had crossed the river of my childhood to 


62 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


the green plain where lay my parents’ graves. I 
knew that white roses would be beaten to wasted 
petals by the rain that day, and that their beauty 
and fragrance would be lost in its downpour. I 
was about to turn back from this act of simple 
homage to my friends when the voice of the soul 
spoke to me to go again and lay the trailing flowers 
on the graves, for I remembered that through the 
rainy days of school-boy sorrows, of youthful 
pangs, and manhood’s moods, my parents all the 
way had scattered roses along my pathway, and I 
left their dreamless homes white with roses, while 
the Sleepless Father watched. 

I walked a mile with Pleasure, 

She chattered all the way; 

But left me none the wiser 
For all she had to say. 

I walked a mile with Sorrow, 

And ne’er a word said she: 

But oh, the things I learned from her 
When Sorrow walked with me. 

The Sparrow's Suffering 
No need to point men to the streets along which 
sorrow ever beckons us with its finger to walk be¬ 
side her. Those who suffer most are the last to 
shrink from its wounds, for sorrow opens the eyes 
of the soul, keeps clean the windows through which 
the soul sees the race of men passing by. They 
who look through the filmy glass of reason see but 
obscurely. Only the soul with skylights polished 
by sorrow sees straight to God. Trouble cannot be 


THE SPARROW’S SCAR 


63 


argued into being right by the keenest brains of 
men, but the soul understands that sorrow alone 
enables one to see the sorrow of other men. The 
soul that has suffered knows by intuition how to 
see the hidden hurts of other hearts. Ho soul has 
ever grown big except it traces its beginning to a 
sorrow or a cross on a hill or through tears that 
flowed from a garden in a valley. 

When we have suffered our windows look out on 
a race akin to us. Having wept, the soul is sensi¬ 
tive to wipe other tears away. The soul having tri¬ 
umphantly smiled through trouble understands the 
smile of those who suffer still. The soul through 
sorrow learns to serve. Those vast spiritual re¬ 
sources, stifled and cold and hard, when touched 
by the glaring sun of affliction, melt and move into 
rivers of benediction and streams of beneficent min¬ 
istry through the meadows where lonely men live. 

War realizes the only blessing it has for men 
when the sufferings of war reveal the hidden glories 
of the soul. The heroisms of war stir and inspire 
and then pass away. The sorrows of war inspire 
and bless and abide forever. A wounded lad car¬ 
ries a bleeding enemy to the dressing station, be¬ 
cause sorrow has taught the soul to serve. The 
wearied physician and fainting nurse seek neither 
rest nor reward for their labour, because temples 
pulsing with pain have pleaded for a ministry un¬ 
rewarded either by money or by pause. Kindly 
souled women and tender men, when sorrow has 


64 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


addressed them, do the common tasks. Learned 
teachers from universities wash Flanders’ mud 
from soldiers’ leggings. Women of fashion in the 
city sleep on narrow cots in the homes of the poor. 
Ministers leave their pulpits and run menial er¬ 
rands for the house of affliction. The soul of the 
city, sobered by sorrow, extends its hand of sym¬ 
pathy and service to every stranger that has wan¬ 
dered inside its walls. 

The sparrow’s fall has shown the city God. 

The Scar and the Song 

Sorrow teaches the soul not to sigh hut to sing, 
not to mope hut to make music. 

I had always regarded the sparrow a plague 
among men, because the kindest of bird lovers have 
detested the house sparrow—the ruffian in feathers, 
cruel, merciless, and a pest. In this scourge of 
sparrows is the song sparrow, maybe the sweetest 
singer of all the fields, with a “ charming song, 
one high note thrice repeated, and then a canary¬ 
like cadenza.” 

“ No sun—no inoon, 

No morn—no noon, 

No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day; 

No sky—no earthly view, 

No distant looking blue, 

No warmths, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease. 

No shades, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, 

No fruits, no flowers, no birds, no leaves— 

November! 

But still the sparrow sings his songs out in the 


THE SPARROW'S SCAR 


65 


fields. Frank Chapman, in u Bird Life/ 7 writes: 
“ His modest chant always suggests good cheer and 
contentment, hut when heard in silent February it 
seems the divinest bird lay to which mortal ever 
listened. The magic of his voice bridges the cold 
months of early spring. As we listen to him the 
brown fields seem green, flowers bloom, and the 
bare branches become clad with softlv rustling 
leaves. 77 

When the scourge comes the soul sings its sweet¬ 
est hymns. Sorrow and sickness and sin always 
discover earth’s best poets. Midnight darkness 
closed Milton’s eyes, but wooed the song of “ Para¬ 
dise Lost ” from his open-windowed soul. Lord 
Tennyson sang his best song, “ Believing where we 
cannot prove,” with the scar of his fallen friend’s 
death still in his heart. Fanny Crosby sang all her 
gentle songs through that long life while the scars 
of blindness closed her eyes. When the “ Titanic ” 
foundered, the sorrows of the sea called upon the 
soul to sing in the open lifeboats, “ Hearer My 
God to Thee.” 

Black should never be sorrow’s colour. It should 
be white or gold or a triumphant red that promises 
the sunrise of a better day. 

Grief sometimes differs from the nobler word, 
sorrow, for grief only often shakes the human 
frame, and cuts the cord of melody; but sorrow is 
a teacher which deftly touches the deeps of the soul 
and releases its hosannas of song. 


€6 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


Henrik Ibsen, in “ The Pretenders/’ teaches the 
secret of the scar and the song in this dialogue: 
King Skule says: 

“Tell me, Jatgeir, how came you to be a bard? Who 
taught you song-craft ? ” 

“ Song-craft,” answers Jatgeir, “ cannot be taught.” 

“ Cannot be taught? How came it then? ” 

“ The gift of sorrow came to me, and I was a bard.” 

“ Then,” says the astonished king, “ it is the gift of sorrow 
that a bard needs? ” 

And Jatgeir answers: 

“ It was sorrow I needed.” 

Jesus, the world’s Divinest Man of Sorrows, in¬ 
spired the “ Hallelujah Chorus ” on a cross. 

These songs that burst out of the scars of the 
fallen sparrows will never cease, even in the land 
that lies beyond the tempests where the colours in 
the skies blend into the rainbow that hushes the 
storm to sleep. 


VII 


THE MODERN MASTER 

“ This same Jesus .”— Acts 1-11. 

I T was left to Ernest Renan, the eminent French 
critic, to set forth Jesus as the Modern Mas¬ 
ter in his striking words, “ A thousand times 
more alive, a thousand times more loved, since thy 
death than during the days of thy pilgrimage here; 
thou shalt become so truly the corner-stone of 
humanity that to tear thy name from the world 
were to shake its foundations.” 

Jesus captivated the great throbbing heart of the 
humble people in the age in which lie lived none 
the less, than as the Modern Master, He dominates 
the life of civilization in this our own day. 

Somehow, the fact of the tragedy of the Cross 
has a meaning which at once transcends all effort 
to explain; and whether the theory of the death of 
Jesus be that of the Middle Ages or that of the 
modern scholarship, the event of His death in both 
cases is a spiritual event which strangely con¬ 
tributes a historic dynamic to the centuries, and is 
still transforming the world. The resurrection of 
its Founder is a fact peculiar to Christianity. 

After three days, unwitnessed, unheralded, Jesus 

67 



68 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


came out of death with a body changed, improved, 
immortal, incorruptible, and spiritual. None but 
sympathetic disciples ever saw Him in the forty 
days preceding the ascension. His body thus 
glorified challenged the faith and the best spiritual 
powers of His disciples. 

A Historical Fact 

The New Testament abounds with the expectant 
hope of the resurrection of Jesus. He, Himself, 
often spoke of it. It is clearly the inspiration of 
the preaching of the early church, and to attain 
to the power of His resurrection was a motive 
which called out the noblest service of the early 
apostles. The book of Romans, whose integrity has 
never been successfully questioned, states, “ He 
was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again 
for our justification.” And the first letter to the 
Corinthian church, whose place as a historical book 
is wholly established, declares: “ If there be no 
resurrection of the dead then is Christ not risen; 
and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching 
vain, and your faith also vain.” 

The resurrection of Jesus is as easily proved 
from unimpeached records as is the incident of 
George Washington’s crossing the Delaware. In 
our day of distress observers of the battle-fields in 
Europe declare that there was scarce a soldier who 
did not believe in the fact of the immortality of 
the soul, and as a corollary to this belief the vast 


THE MODERN MASTER 


69 


regiments of thinking soldiers, with blinding fire- 
blasts and reeking shrapnel swathing death lanes 
on all sides of them, somehow are taking a greater 
and realer comfort in the fact of resurrection, 
which couples together the immortal soul and the 
body after death. 

The Master of His Intimates 
The New Testament presents the record of more 
than five hundred eye-witnesses to the risen Lord. 
History, recorded by a careful scribe, years after 
rumors and traditions have cleared away, increases 
its value as a record the longer its pages remain 
unimpeached. Thus with the New Testament pre¬ 
senting Mary in the early morning crying, “ Rab- 
boni,” and those other women in the garden meet¬ 
ing the Lord face to face, with the pensive disciples 
on the Emmaus road testifying to His presence; 
and Peter alone in some Galilean bower; and at 
the close of the first Sunday the ten disciples in 
the barred room stirred to the ecstasy of worship 
by the sudden appearance of Jesus—certainly 
these eye-witnesses become cumulative as a jury of 
spectators of the risen Jesus captivating His little 
company of believers. Later we have the Lord’s 
presentation of himself to the eleven, when Thomas 
comes forth with his testimony immortal, in reas¬ 
suring conversation with James, his doubting 
brother. To the five hundred in a single epiphany, 
to the fisher by Tiberius Lake, and finally to the 


70 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


disciples on the way to Bethany, when they saw 
Him gently lifted, transported, ascending to the 
heavens, from which in like manner He shall re¬ 
turn. Upon the testimony of these eye-witnesses 
of record we might almost rest. Greenleaf, thd 
world’s great authority on evidence, in his volume 
on the harmony of the Four Gospels as related to 
the evidence of the eye-witnesses to the resurrec¬ 
tion, states his significant opinion that “ The testi¬ 
mony of the eye-witnesses to the resurrection of 
Jesus is conclusive.” The proof from the record 
convinces one of the fact. 

Heath is the natural end of all men. You lose 
a friend by death. You come to me at the close 
of three days and say, “ Come, dine with me, I 
have a friend risen from the dead.” I make light 
of your strange fancy. I answer you: “ I will not 
come; I knew your friend. It was natural that he 
die. He suffered and murmured because he suf¬ 
fered. He had the common faults of men. It was 
natural that he die, for to all men there comes once 
death.” But here is Jesus, the contemporary of 
the ages, among philosophers the chief, among 
teachers the first, he stands head and shoulders 
above all men, sinless, stainless, scarless in moral 
fiber. He sweeps through the centuries as the 
silhouetted figure against the skyline of every age. 
Nations which sat in darkness have seen his great 
light. “ Never a single word which he uttered has 
been discredited,” cried Romanes, and Jesus in His 


THE MODERN MASTER 


71 


earthly career has kept all the law which, if a man 
keeps, says Jehovah, he shall live thereby. But 
Jesus dies, He is buried, and the onlooking by¬ 
stander asks of God: “ Where is thy integrity ? 
Why should a blameless life, having kept the law, 
reap the wages of sin, being sinless ? ” “ God’s 

character,” writes Johnston-Ross, “ is at stake, hut 
in the last moment he is rescued by the resurrec¬ 
tion of Jesus.” It were a greater miracle to ex¬ 
plain God and solve the problem of Jesus without 
resurrection than to accept the fact of a risen Lord. 
Greater even than his singular personality are the 
survival values of the spiritual qualities and per¬ 
sistent moral buttresses of the post-resurrection ex¬ 
pressions of the life of Jesus. Jesus, because of 
what He was, and what He is, and what He did, 
must rise from the dead, else His life is common¬ 
place as man’s. 

The Master of Modern Life 
Often by the testimony of the saints who endure, 
often by the transformation of barbarous communi¬ 
ties into centers of mercy, by the hospitals that 
literally fleck every hillside as flowers cover the 
vales, often by the quiet intrusion of the life of 
the living risen Christ with the gentleness of one 
who quenches no smoking flax and breaks no 
bruised or broken reed into the very potential cen¬ 
ters of civic and national, and international affairs, 
Jesus is conquering the earth. The world has all 


72 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


but made up its mind that Jesus lives and still in¬ 
volves his life in the events and programs of man. 
Recently a prominent minister of Jesus was intro¬ 
duced by a Jewish rabbi. 

“ You,” he said, “ believe in the Christ that has 
come and conquered. We believe in the Messiah 
yet to come, but we desire to say that if our Mes¬ 
siah will meet the measure of your Christ, we as 
Jews shall be satisfied.” 

But the doctrine of the resurrection stands like 
a sentinel’s steel armour, empty in a picture museum 
unless we can thrust into the doctrine a vital per¬ 
sonality who moves the shining armour to take its 
place in the lists of life. 

The fact that Jesus rose from the dead spiritual¬ 
izes the common ways of men. He is their com¬ 
panion on the plains, in the battles, in the quiet 
agony of grief. His disciples had lost Him, and 
they were seeking His grave: 

“ Oh! could’st thou but know 
With what deep devotedness of woe 
We wept thy absence, o’er and o’er. 

Again thinking of thee, still of thee, 

Till thought grew pain, and memory, 

Like a drop that night and day 

Falls cold and ceaseless, wore our hearts away.” 

But Jesus was in the garden at the very side of 
Mary the devoted; on the road to the quiet village 
he was walking with the two dejected men; in the 
profusion of a bower of springing flowers he 
cheered and forgave the denying Peter; and in the 


THE MODERN MASTER 


73 


upper room, with the windows closed and barriers 
hung, he smiled in victory on the defeated, fearing 
Eleven. When we walk along the Via Dolorosa, 
Jesus is our companion, our presence, our friend. 
Every common task has a halo of glory sur¬ 
rounding it. The cross on our insignia is no longer 
a rude method of death, it is the signal of the hosts 
of the largest life. Bethlehem has hallowed every 
cradle with its child, Gethsemane has wrapped the 
world in a common badge of fellowship of sorrow, 
and Golgotha is the challenge to every wronged man 
to wait patiently for a final justice. 

If a man is a Christian, he does not have to raise 
his voice to summon his Christ in the dark night, 
when the pulse heats slow and the songs have stilled 
their voices. He is the alert Christ. He is thrust¬ 
ing our doors inward, seeking to befriend us, when 
we thought Him asleep in the grave. The drudg¬ 
eries of the housewife and the gray grind of the 
fretting wheels of commerce are every day being 
transformed in the delights of victories and the 
dreams of those who overcome. Donald Hankey 
discovered Him in the trenches of war when the 
summons to charge came. “ Men,” he said, “ if 
wounded, ‘ Blighty f if killed, resurrection.” 

Mount Pilatus, famous for the splendour of its 
sunrises, reaches its highest point at Eisel. I stood 
there in the early morning, shrouded in the gar¬ 
ments of the sunless gloom, watching the east for 
the sunrise. The Bernese Alps, stretching away 


74 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


for one hundred and fifty miles, were like the gray- 
bloused shoulders of a giant asleep. A score of 
Swiss lakes were dull in their dim outlines at our 
feet below. It was chill and drear. But away in 
the east were faint ribbons of blue and streamers 
of crimson bordering along the trail of the break¬ 
ing day. The Alps were now flaming red at their 
crests; and the Swiss lakes were glowing into pearl 
and opal iridescent charm, the highest peaks shone 
with golden sunbeams glistening, and every niche 
and cranny of the mountains were filled with the 
eff ulgent light: the sun was rising over Pilatus and 
daylight was everywhere. Many are the gray, sun¬ 
less mornings in our lives, we cannot understand 
them. Drear, tragic, unsolved often are these prob¬ 
lems of Providence, perchance a death, a financial 
collapse, a moral disaster, a cataclysm of war; but 
Jesus is a risen Lord, and He reveals Himself often 
in the patient waiting, often in the solitude of sun¬ 
less hours, often when the east winds have rough¬ 
ened the seas or the bugle has summoned men to 
blood and battle, He reveals and quickens hope; 
and surely, never failing, at last to the waiting 
disciples He floods the soul with His shining pres¬ 
ence and quieting assurance and His benediction of 
peace—and there is sunlight everywhere. 

The Master of the UmowN 
-Christianity teaches its disciples that the Chris¬ 
tian’s death is a triumph, not a tragedy; death is a 


THE MODERN MASTER 


75 


dream of hope, never a disaster; death is a victory, 
never a verdict of guilt. Oftentimes when I try 
to recall the happiest days of life, I wander hack 
to the ecstasies of joy that came to me on the days 
when my parents went into the dream of hope. 
My father had been preaching the truths of the 
gospel of Jesus for nearly half a century, and that 
was his crowning; she, the preacher’s wife, had 
wept and smiled and lifted and garnered with him, 
and on that day she came into the victory of the 
waving palms. 

Death, taught Jesus, is a sleep, and when the 
day is dying the tired child climbs into his father’s 
arms and falls asleep to waken in the early morn¬ 
ing in a world where he never grows weary of toil 
and his work never rusts with failure. He taught, 
too, that the figure of the exodus is the figure of 
death. Moses and Elias spoke of his exodus, the 
passing out of slavery, life’s limitations, its task¬ 
master’s scourge the shrouded glory of life through 
the dark days of the wilderness, into the land of 
freedom and days of dreams fulfilled, and purposes 
and plans perfected and a rich land, and a throne, 
and a king entered upon his endless reign. This 
is death, teaches Jesus. 

He who, in his boyhood, has watched the ships 
sail out to sea knows the figure by which Paul in¬ 
terprets death to Christianity. “ The time of my 
departure is at hand.” With the imagination of a 
boy who was born near the sea, he is watching the 


76 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


ships unmoor. There they depart, the ships, cast¬ 
ing off the ropes, the hawsers, the cords that held 
them fast. They have unmoored. They drift 
silently. They spread the canvas and trim the sails 
for newer harbours, better harbours, always with 
hope, always seeing golden strands and quiet waters 
overseas. The ship is lost awhile, and moors again 
beyond the flowing of the tide, in the harbour of 
God. This tie of friendship, the cares of home life, 
the ropes that entwine us with the earthly things, 
we cast off one by one, we set our sails, and the 
waters are quiet waters and the land is “ the land 
of a fadeless day.” Death is an unmooring; Jesus 
is the Master of the Unknown. 

When Saint John, the Apostle of Love, had 
finished his course and the call had come, they 
gathered about him and he told them perhaps that 
death was a home-coming. “ I go to prepare a 
home for you,” he had heard Jesus say, and John 
was confident in his fading days that he was going 
home. Death was near. And this was his hope: 
“ Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth 
not yet appear what we shall be; we shall be like 
him.” The apostle of old age had seen the home 
and the returning Christ, for when he had led them 
as far as Bethany, he lifted up his hands and 
blessed them and they worshipped as he was carried 
into heaven, and a voice said, “ This same Jesus 
(the risen Lord) which is taken up from you into 


THE MODERN MASTER 


77 

heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have 
seen him go.” 

Perchance He is near; no man knows His time 
to return. The hillsides may now even be forests 
of purple glory. Jesus is coming again. Even so, 
come, Lord Jesus. 

“ There’s a King and Captain high, who’ll be cornin’ by-and- 

*>y, 

And He’ll find me hoein’ cotton when He comes; 

You will hear His legions chargin’ in the thunders of the 
sky, 

And He’ll find me hoein’ cotton when He comes! 

$ 

When He comes, when He comes, 

All the dead will rise in answer to His drums, 

While the fires of His encampment star the firmament on 
high, 

And the heavens are rolled asunder, when He comes! 

There’s a Man they thrust aside, who was tortured till He 
died, 

And He’ll find me hoein’ cotton when He comes; 

He was hated and rejected, He was scourged and crucified, 
But He’ll find me hoein’ cotton when He comes! 

When He comes, when He comes, 

He’ll be ringed with saints and angels when He comes; 
They’ll be shoutin’ out hosannas to the Man that men denied, 
And I’ll kneel among my cotton, when He comes! ” 


VIII 


THE PLENITUDE OF PEAYEE 

“ Now it came to pass, that Jesus having been baptized and 
praying, the heaven ivas opened.” —Luke 3:21. 

T HE heaven was opened and Jesus saw the 
Dove, and God and everything. While 
praying, the heaven opened to Jesus, and 
Jesus opened His inner eyes to the fullest con¬ 
sciousness of Himself. As a lad of twelve, such a 
religious precocity possessed Jesus that He enjoyed 
the blessed experience of knowing His Father and 
under the Syrian sky in the nights of silence before 
God at Nazareth, He revelled in the delights of 
divine fellowship,—but now the heaven opens and 
Jesus, praying, enters in the plenitude of His ex¬ 
perience with God; the plenitude of His equip¬ 
ment, and the plenitude of the assurance that His 
Father is well pleased in His Beloved. 

In this brief pastoral I desire to show that the 
fullness of knowing God, of knowing the heavens, 
of knowing everything, comes while at prayer. 
This knowledge comes not only through prayer, but 
while actually praying, the progressive unfolding 
of all spiritual knowledge and fellowship becomes 
our possession. 


78 


THE PLENITUDE OF PRAYER 


79 


The crowd has pushed its eager way to the 
rugged Baptist and has gone on its way a repentant 
people,—then comes Jesus, and the gentle ripples 
of the waters are pushed lapping about His feet, 
they bathe His ankles in white spray and surge in 
silver splendour about his loins. The awe-stricken 
John, buries the shining beauty of Jesus’ body be' 
neath the waters of the river, and having been bap¬ 
tized, while praying, the heaven opened. The 
Dove, beauteous, silent, descended, the voice of God 
mingling every sweet sound of earth, in sacred 
sanction, spake, “ This is my Beloved Son in whom 
I am well pleased.” 

He was baptized and He prayed, and the truth 
remains that while Jesus prayed, He climbed the 
golden pinnacle of prayer and the visible and in¬ 
visible opened, the known and the unknown was 
revealed, God and man, earth and heaven opened. 

To the man who prays, the silent mysteries of 
this universe will break into speech, and the heights 
and depths and breadths of divine knowledge will 
open their covered pathways to his invasion. To 
Jesus, praying, the heaven opened. 

Prayer Opens the Skylight of the Soul 

First then, Jesus saw and heard, while praying. 
His was a vital experience of Divine fellowship. 
Perhaps the Baptist saw the Dove and heard the 
voice. Jesus, maybe neither saw with His eyes the 
Dove, nor heard with His ears the voice. It was 


80 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


the inner-self of Jesus that saw and heard. Jesus 
was more fully conscious than ever before of a per¬ 
sonal presence, of His Father’s fellowship, and of 
a crowning companionship hitherto not experi¬ 
enced. Jesus, while praying, entered into His 
deepest experience of God. 

This experience was related, not so much with 
Jesus’ baptism, as with His praying. This was the 
supreme entrance by Jesus into the fullest fellow¬ 
ship with God. Now the white dove shone like the 
light of the shekinah through the skylight of His 
soul, and the voice of God, which hitherto had 
sounded the lesser notes of His experience, now 
broke in a divine diapason. 

When, as a timid lad of ten, my own father 
baptized me, I heard him say with grace in his 
voice, “ I baptize thee, my son, in the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” 
and a new fellowship had sprung up between us 
from that moment, when I had been raised out of 
the lapping waters, I saw on his face the holy light 
of joy; and Jesus infinitely more grandly saw the 
dove and heard the voice,—while praying. 

Our deepest acquaintance with God comes while 
praying. The plenitude of His presence then is 
our possession. While praying, we give Him a 
chance to speak and reveal Himself. I asked my 
theological teacher once, if a pupil of his was a 
strong man. He answered: “ I do not know, he 
has never asked me a question, he only answers.” 


THE PLENITUDE OF PRAYER 


81 


We never enter into tlie depths of God’s self until 
we allow Him time to speak to us while praying. 
The Christian church to-day is confronted by a 
spectacle of humour. The prophet in the pulpit is 
lashing the laity to advance, while like a whimper¬ 
ing, whining, craven dog, it cringes in the pew, 
little able to fathom the prayerless note of the 
preacher and without that vital experience of the 
deepest spiritual things himself, to warrant an irre¬ 
sistible motive to advance. We have clamoured so 
much for advance, for making exhibit of our 
strength, and have given so little time for retreat, 
the retreat of experience, that this Christian age 
takes no time to “ Be still and know that I am 
God.” But with it all, honest hearts and simple 
faiths are not deceived. 

This age is alert for the prophet, who has forged 
like steel into his soul, the certainty of his belief 
in God, and has wrought out of a rugged and 
sublime experience, his abiding vision of the face 
of Christ. The quiet hour, the mystic meditation, 
the soul’s aspiring, is the moment of prayer, when 
God is given an opportunity to speak. 

My feeble hands touch the palpable, my dim eyes 
look on the visible, my dull ears hear the audible, 
my dumb tongue speaks the articulate. The high 
waves of terror may weaken my hands with fever, 
my eyes with blindness, leave my ears deaf, my 
tongue silent; but still in the moment of prayer, 
in the toils of the night’s terrors, my tongue by 


82 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


faith may cry out to God, my eyes behold the glory 
of the celestial, my ears listen, my hands reach up 
and lay hold of Him. This moment is the moment 
of the soul’s ecstasy, of the inner experience of 
man, the moment of the possession of the plenitude 
of God, while praying. 

“ Jesus, these eyes have never seen 
That radiant form of thine, 

The veil of sense hangs dark between 
Thy blessed face and mine. 

I see Thee not. I hear Thee not, 

Yet Thou art oft with me. 

And earth has ne’er so dear a spot 
As when I meet with Thee.” 

Prayer Armours the Saint 
Jesus was equipped for service and armoured 
against the wilderness temptation, while praying, 
for, says Luke, “ Jesus praying, the Holy Spirit de¬ 
scended ” upon Him. This was His equipment. 
This is ours. 

To be “ full of the Holy Spirit returning from 
the Jordan,” may he variously interpreted. I ven¬ 
ture to believe it means that Jesus was now in a 
plenary way, possessed by a personality of energy, 
of illumination, of comfort, of companionship. 
The Holy Spirit guides, reveals, abides, fellowships. 
The spirit “ leads into truth,” “ brings to the re¬ 
membrance,” “ leaves not orphans,” and “ shall he 
in us.” If any man lack wisdom, let him pray. 
If our gentle-hearted parents give us gifts of good¬ 
ness, how much more shall our heaven-hearted 


THE PLENITUDE OP PRAYER 


83 


Father give us the Holy Spirit when we pray. 
The saint is often wrought with anxious confusion 
when he attempts to ask of God. Then the Spirit 
helpeth these infirmities,—while praying. The 
hard grind of the hours of preparation disentangle 
in the aftermath of prayer. After the quiet bril¬ 
liance of a moment, when the soul distraught, has 
flung itself at the bottom of the golden highway 
of heaven, in that moment there comes the flush of 
triumph against the harassing adversary. Have 
not the sheep sought the confident protection of the 
Shepherd’s staff when the hissing foe started the 
grass blades in the valley pasture? Was this not 
a sense of equipment, a fortified confidence against 
the enemy? Did not the sheep seek the Shepherd’s 
rod through prayer? 

Oftentimes the preacher, while praying, is given 
an entire sermon. A message comes to him. I be¬ 
lieve this is the equipment of the Holy Spirit. The 
modern preacher is quite as much a prophet as was 
Isaiah. There is a prophecy of intelleetualism, and 
a prophecy of divine revelation. The prophet 
whose media are the processes of the mind, a re¬ 
sultant of keen perception and analysis of events 
and trends, is a prophet indeed. 'Carlyle was such 
a prophet, of such was the.famous letter of Lord 
Macaulay regarding the industrial development of 
America, such also was the genius of Thomas Jef¬ 
ferson in his subtle foresight of America’s Civil 
War. Whether these were prophets simply of in- 


84 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


tellectualism, I dare not say, “yet in their type, 
sympathy with the divine plan, and a reverent relig¬ 
ious spirit is not foremost.” There is a prophecy, 
real, practical, existent to-day which though akin 
to, yet sweeps far above the sphere of the ration¬ 
alist. It has its source in the faraway hills, its 
stimulus is the divine mind, its spirit .is bourne 
along in its facile flow by a warm sympathy, an 
ever-enlarging acquaintance with the glory of God, 
and its beneficent waters are for the healing of the 
nation. It has its genesis in the moment of prayer, 
it shows its power in those unexplainable flights of 
spiritual intensity which sometimes possess the 
preacher in his sermon. Nor need the true 
prophet’s genius be the despair of the humblest 
man, the intellectual scullion, whom God has chosen 
to speak His thought and mind, and has set him 
in the lowest room of His kingdom,—for while 
praying, the heaven opens. 

The rationalist must maintain that the preacher 
of sermons,—the prophet of God,—rises only to the 
level of his preparation. The Mystic avows that 
he can be “ singularly assisted.” I do not dis¬ 
avow preparation,—I urge it,—but the preacher is 
often bourne out of himself and possessed by a 
mighty inspiring factor, which cannot be satisfac¬ 
torily assigned by himself to any faculty of his 
own. In the growth of the child there is no period 
of absolute freedom save one. 

In the first stages of the growth of the child, 


THE PLENITUDE OF PRAYER 


85 


there is a period which may he described as the 
sense period, when the inhibition of the senses 
makes him a slave to his environment, as when the 
hand is burned, the yoke of suffering is ever after¬ 
wards the restraint to future action. This is the 
period of the authority of the senses. Then comes 
the inhibition of parental control, as the restraining 
factor upon the child’s activities ; this is the period 
of parental authority. The child is not yet free. 
We jump over the next period to the fourth, which 
is the inhibition of the youth’s own judgment, the 
youth is restrained in his actions by sober judg¬ 
ment, gained out of bitter experiences. This is the 
period of the authority and restraint of the judg¬ 
ment. The period passed over is the period of 
license. Sense is thrown to the winds, parental 
control is unheeded, judgment is discarded, and the 
youth runs riot in the sowing of his wild oats. He 
stupefies his senses, breaks his parents’ hearts, ruins 
his own reputation,—all for license in conduct and 
freedom from restraint. This period is the return 
to the animal in man. 

Much the same is the experience of the preacher 
in his holy desire for freedom,—“ the freedom of 
all space twixt the earth and the skies,”—the sacred 
reveling of the prophet as in an ecstasy, a rapture, 
a possession. To the preacher, as he faces a con¬ 
gregation, there is the restraint of the senses,—his 
own and his auditor’s taste; then there is the re¬ 
straint of the demand of the hungry souls which 


86 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


lie must needs feed, a restraint winch, will uncon¬ 
sciously play in the building of a sermon, and thus, 
in a wise, limit the sermon to specific audiences; 
and next the preacher’s own judgment will serve 
as a restraint upon what he ought to say and what 
he ought not. These are needful, all of them, but 
let taste as a restraint be cast aside, the auditors as 
such be unheeded, narrowing judgment be put 
under, and as by a singular freedom, there flows 
into the preacher’s mind and heart a real presence 
and help; he abandons every ordinary inhibition to 
the free expression of the message of Jehovah, and 
with a luxuriant, full, virile, mighty confidence, the 
strength and authority and triumph of the prophet 
lays hold of him for a moment,—his equipment is 
at hand, and those awe-filling passages, those per¬ 
fectly marvelous sentences, and those heaven- 
seated thoughts leave the audience in amazing won¬ 
der, with an inscrutable impression of God’s pres¬ 
ence, while the room seems to have been filled with 
the glory of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. 
This is the hour of the preacher’s inspiration. He 
has been bourne out of himself, into the current of 
God’s own way and word and will. The genesis is 
in the closet,—while praying, the heaven opened. 

Prayer Summons Heaven's Smile 
Now the baptismal drama is closing. Jesus, 
having been baptized, prays, and hears a voice: 
“ This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well 


THE PLENITUDE OF PRAYER 


87 


pleased.” This is the assurance of Jesus that His 
Father is satisfied with His life in the flesh. How 
like the choral of the celestial choir must have been 
this voice out of the heavens! Perhaps now, for 
the first time since Bethlehem, the hidden memory 
of the eternal has returned. God was well pleased 
with Jesus because He had fulfilled the expectation 
of God. And certainly likewise, God is well 
pleased with man. To be sure, man is a sinner 
and needs salvation. He is ruined and needs a re¬ 
deemer. But let us ever remember that in the 
process of being made, man passed through divine 
hands. Man in his fall never forfeited his possi¬ 
bilities, nor did he sever God’s responsibility to 
man. Do not think God is well pleased with man 
because he is not as black as he could be. God 
is well pleased with us, because of the fathomless 
possibilities of human nature which rise to magnifi¬ 
cent humanity when called by His voice to meet 
His challenge of confidence and expectation toward 
us. While praying, you and I feel our greatest 
worth to God. This is His assurance that He is 
well pleased. About us, around us, oft hang the 
gray clouds of self-abasement, but never are these 
gray clouds present in the moment of prayer,—that 
is the moment of golden confidence. “ This is my 
beloved Son,” he has fulfilled the hope of God, 
justified His confidence, met His expectation. 
Man on his face in the closet, praying, in spite of 
his ruined and ravaged self, in spite of his wounds, 


88 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


and wastes, has the confidence to hear His Father 
say, “ Thou art my beloved, in spite of the habit 
of man to make light of thy fellowship with me and 
mine with thee. Thy Father is well pleased.” 
This is God’s assurance to His Child Redeemed. 

When the foot has stumbled and the head has 
turned and the heart has failed, you and I go stag¬ 
gering with a blindly broken spirit to the hour of 
prayer, out from the heavens, out of the blue In¬ 
finite, comes a voice, comes our Father’s tenderest 
whisper,—“ Thou art beloved, I am well pleased.” 

The bruised and bleeding and holy Stephen 
kneels and cries while praying, “ Lord, lay not this 
sin to their charge,” and with a white light on his 
martyr’s face, looking steadfastly into heaven, he 
saw the glory of God and Jesus standing, and said, 
“ Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son 
of Man standing on the right hand of God.” 

When faith is stoned and stunned and scourged, 
see the heavens open and hear the orchestration of 
heaven’s supremest melody singing its song to us,— 
“ Thou art my beloved, I am well pleased! ” 

Once that gentlest of spirits in English prose,— 
Charles Lamb,—wrote to his friend, Coleridge, ex¬ 
pressing the hope that he might recall his mother 
for a single moment and beg forgiveness. Poor, 
gentle, sensitive Charles Lamb, caretaker of a sec¬ 
ond-childhood father, tender nurse to an intermit¬ 
tently insane sister, renouncer of a hope to marry 
while under this cross, gentle Charles Lamb, what 


THE PLENITUDE OF PRAYER 


89 


would that mother say ? With her thin feeble hand 
she would brush back the care from your white 
forehead and whisper in the secret places of your 
sensitive soul, with not a word of censure for your 
little faults, “ Charles, thou art my beloved, I am 
well pleased.” That would be his assurance. And 
to us there comes, while praying, to the wounded 
heart, balm; to the lonely spirit, a presence, and 
to the sensitive self, assurances,—“ My beloved, I 
am well pleased.” 

While praying comes the plenitude of God, and 
the partial visions caught in the closet will ever 
enlarge till the eternal soul of man goes leaping 
on along the endless golden strand. 


I 


IX 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


Psalm, 23. 

I X Jean Millet’s familiar painting, “ The An- 
. gelus,” there is portrayed a harvest field with 
two low-browed peasants in the foreground, 
reverently bowed in worship. At some distance is 
a fainter outline of a village church. A perfect 
calm pervades each detail and the whole scene 
seems to he at peace. An eminent critic was asked 
his opinion of the painting, and when he beheld it, 
after quiet contemplation for a brief space, spoke 
reverently, “ I hear the Angelus hell .’ 7 This bell 
was rung at the morning, noon and night, and men 
knew by this sign that thousands lifted their voices 
at this time in the hymn of the Annunciation. And 
I feel when we read or chant or meditate upon this 
Shepherd Psalm of David, we can hear faintly the 
harp of the Sweet Singer of Israel, bringing to¬ 
gether in one perfect poem the Shepherd days of 
his ruddy youth with a prophetic imagery of Him 
who came to be “ the Good Shepherd of the Sheep.” 
This twenty-third Psalm is the Angelus hell of the 
Old Testament, rung in the twilight of its greatest 
poet’s life, which, when we hear, calls us to bow 
in adoring worship. 


90 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


91 


Upon one of those sweet Judean days in the 
springtime, with fresh-scented winds sweeping up 
to his palace, David sits at the dusk, offering up 
the melody of his harp in worship to God. The 
browsing sheep yonder on the sloping green, and 
the Shepherd moving swiftly about to herd them 
ere he leads them home through the fast-filling 
shadows, brings to David’s mind his Shepherd’s 
days—just as fancy brings to you and me the light 
of other days—perchance the old log schoolhouse, 
the ringing of the village hell, or “ the scent of hay- 
fields or of summer rains.” David sees the canvas 
of his youth unroll,—green pastures, still waters, 
the limpid eyes of his tender sheep following him 
—their Shepherd—and then, as the day wanes, and 
the arches of his palace throw their slender shadow- 
ghosts eastward, and the clear Judean sky fills up 
with a murky haze, tinted with the red of the dying 
sun, suddenly to the Shepherd-hard, the scene is 
changed—deep gorges with sloping sides indented 
here and there with dark caves, heavy growths in 
the dark passes, the harking of hungry wolves and 
the covered stealth of the robber, harrow his vision 
with fears, and David’s mind is drawn to his sim¬ 
ple loving, frightened sheep, huddling about him 
with a complacent calmness, and a surety of trust 
in their leader, and with an inspiration which is 
bom of Jehovah, he strikes his harp and sings this 
Psalm: 



92 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


“ The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. 

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth 
me beside the still waters. 

He restoreth my soul; He leadeth me in the paths of right¬ 
eousness for His name’s sake. 

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod 
and thy staff they comfort me. 

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine 
enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth 
over. 

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of 
my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord-forever.” 

The Psalm may be broken up into a simple and 
brief analysis. The first verse is the theme of the 
whole Psalm,—“ The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall 
not want.”—Confident trust in Jehovah for all 
things. The second and third verses, “ ITe maketh 
me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me 
beside the still waters; He restoreth my soul; He 
leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His 
name’s sake;” this is trusting Jehovah in pros¬ 
perity, which is humility. 

The fourth and fifth verses, “ Yea, though I 
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I 
will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod 
and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a 
table before me in the presence of my enemies. 
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth 
over;” this is trusting Jehovah in adversity, which 
is humiliation. 

The sixth verse is the Doxology, in which David 
draws aside the veil of the future and looks into 
the Eternal Courts. 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


93 


Trust in God—Trust when things are bright, 
with humility; trust when things are dark, though 
humiliated; trust through the length of days. 

This is not the lute song of a Shepherd lad, crude 
in the lessons of life; it is a lyric of old age, an 
idyl of a Shepherd-King, whose journeys had been 
many, into whose life had come many shadow-vales, 
and who had often been compassed about with ene¬ 
mies,—and now with a long life tempered by ex¬ 
perience, he sings this song of rest and trust: 

Verse 1. “The Lord is my Shepherd ,”—so has 
the figure run through all Scripture because it in¬ 
terprets the life of the Hebrew people,—nomadic 
wanderers with flocks through years of desert life. 
Abraham and Isaac tended their flocks in the 
desert, and thus became wealthy keepers of sheep. 

A good shepherd must attend his flocks at all 
times. In the early morning the shepherd’s call 
6ets on the move his flock; the pleasant pastures of 
the noon day must be carefully chosen, at evening 
straight paths must be selected and a safe journey 
must be made, and then through starless nights the 
vigilant shepherd must keep watch over his flock. 

“ The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. 

But he that is an hireling, and not the Shepherd, whose 
own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the 
sheep, and fleeth; and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth 
^ll 0 sll66p. 

The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth 
not for the sheep. 

I am the Good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am 
known of mine.” 



94 


THE SONG AT SUNKISE 


Jesus Christ never led a sheep into a briar patch, 
or turned a deaf ear to its bleating of distress. 

And the sheep are so foolish, the lambs so tender. 
No creature is quite so silly as the sheep. They 
will wander off into the thorns and brush and be¬ 
come entangled so that they cannot find their way 
back. They will in no wise resist the ensnaring 
one, and even before their shearers they are dumb. 
The sheep is the type of helplessness and the sym¬ 
bol of trust. It was the insufficiency of David that 
urged him to trust in Jehovah. We, like sheep, are 
gone astray. We are helpless, very. When the 
Good Shepherd came He found His own as having 
no shepherd and scattered, but He had compassion 
upon them and gathered them together, but at a 
time when some of them would go back with pathos, 
He said to the twelve, “ Will ye also go away?” 
And Simon Peter spoke, feeling as you feel and as 
the world feels in its helpless estate, “ Lord, to 
whom shall we go ? Thou has the words of eternal 
life.” Again the true sheep knows no stranger and 
the Shepherd’s voice is sweet music which calleth 
them back. 

“ And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth 
before them, and the sheep follow him; for they knowetk 
his voice. 

And a stranger they will not follow, but will flee from him; 
for they know not the voice of strangers.” 

" I shall not want ”—In a palace with plenty, 
yet this king says I shall desire nothing, because 
I am a sheep of the Good Shepherd. What did 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


95 


lie mean ? lie meant that palaces and kingdoms 
are but sordid lucre when compared with the peace 
of conscience and the security which comes through 
the love of the Shepherd. 

“ Is not the life more than meat, and the body more than 
raiment? 

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do 
they reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father 
feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they ? ” 

“ I shall not want ” is the cry of insufficiency. 
It is the testimony of an old man who knows of the 
fullness of Jehovah. It is the refrain of the be¬ 
liever only. The “ heathen heart who puts its trust 
in tubes of steel and iron shard ” cannot sing this 
song, “ I shall not want.” Buddha’s priest cannot 
say, “ I shall not want,” but better can they say 
with that hopeless Indian woman, “ Good teacher, 
the Indian people are a feeble people, bom lame 
and they shall never walk.” The disciples of Con¬ 
fucius cannot say, ci I shall not want,” for swarm¬ 
ing in their misery to the temple of mystery, mil¬ 
lions are groping their way through the darkness, 
if perchance they may find some doorway leading 
to a land of light. You sometimes can say, “ I do 
not want.” Often you must make of your study 
or closet a Gethsemane, and with head buried in 
hands cry, “ Oh, Lord, thy people are hungry and 
I have not with which to feed them.” Often men 
are sick at heart and want medicine. Often 
wounded of spirit and they want balm. Tired and 


96 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


they want sleep. Hungry and they want to be fed. 
Weary and they want rest. Burdened and worried 
and they want peace. And in those moments, the 
temple trumpets sound and the timbrels cry aloud 
and the congregation of Israel chanteth well, “ The 
Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” “ When 
I sent you,” said our Lord to His apostles, “ with¬ 
out purse and scrip and shoes, lacked ye any¬ 
thing?” and they said, “ Nothing.” So many 
things disturb our rest, but so many are the visions 
that we have. Sometimes when hunted and har¬ 
assed and hounded, come our most exalted joys. 
Sometimes when imagination plays over the fairest 
bowers of a fancied Eden, come the finest experi¬ 
ences and visions of the cross. Sometimes in sor¬ 
row, come these visions of satisfied wants. We 
stand at the open grave and fold our calm, silent 
sorrow to our bosom and weep through the vision 
of the resurrection. But whence is our help? Up 
among the hills, where a voice ever is calling and 
a heart ever singing to earth-wearied men: 

“ Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and 
I will give you rest.’* 

Verse 2 and 3. And now the second and third 
verses—“ He maketh me to lie down in green 
pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. 
He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths 
of righteousness for His name’s sake.” 

Here is a picture. The sheep frolicking—the 
shepherd’s bright coloured robe spread upon the 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


97 


green meadow land,—still waters and straight 
smooth paths. Here is sunshine without its 
shadows—And even the psalmist trusts in Jehovah. 
It is much harder to think of trusting when the 
sky is blue overhead than when the clouds are low¬ 
ering. In sunshine we do not feel our need, but 
in shadows we are driven to trust. This is not the 
note of a shepherd lad—ah, no—that lad’s heart 
must be broken and tears must be wrung from his 
soul before he can know what the fullness of trust 
in his Lord must mean. Humility is trusting 
Jehovah when we do not feel we have to. Humilia¬ 
tion is trusting when we can do naught else. Catch 
this discrimination. Two godly parents lose an 
only child. They are meek at the voice of Provi¬ 
dence and cry, “ The Lord gave and the Lord tak- 
eth away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Very 
good. But this is not humility. It is humiliation. 
They have been struck and they bow. Humiliation 
is the whine of the dumb beast that is beaten.. 
Humiliation is the whimper of the brute under its 
master’s lash. But humility is the cry of John the 
Baptist when the multitude would call him the 
Christ. “ He must increase, but I must decrease.” 
Humility is the prayer of Cardinal Sarto, late 
Pius X, when they offered him the papal chair and 
rule over millions of subjects, “ Let this cup pass 
from me. I am not worthy, I am not worthy.” 
Here is this king in his palace with a kingdom, but 
the humble cry, “ Thou hast given him his heart’s 


98 THE SONG AT SUNRISE 

desire, and hast not withholden the requests of his 
lips.” 

But again to the picture. The shepherd leads 
his flock into pastures of tender grass upon which 
even the tenderest lambs may munch and munch 
and he fed, and unto pasture-grass which is not 
covered here and there with hits of sharp twigs and 
briars and flint, but it is grass good to rest upon. 
How the Lord does lead us into the most beautiful 
of Christian experiences, upon which we may find 
rest for our weary souls. But the Good Shepherd 
does more. He selects his pasture, not where the 
steady roar of the cataract, tumbling over precipices 
and fluttering its thousand feet of lace, reflects and 
flashes the sunlight upon the resting flock, but the 
waters are waters of quietness and the rest of the 
flock is tranquil. How marred would be the pleas¬ 
ant experiences of life if the ever-present voices of 
a quietless conscience were reflecting upon our 
memory each misdeed and unholy thought. 

“ For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their 
sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” 

But always allurements are in our way and we 
yield. Now to the restlessness that wishes better 
pastures now to the call of the ensnarer. But the 
Shepherd comes to us and finds us. We have gone 
into the desert sometimes and He searches for us. 
Sometimes we have fallen into the deepest ravine, 
and when in the evening, we grow lonely and cold 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


99 


and helpless, we can hear the voice of the Shepherd 
singing on the highest height, calling ns back to 
the fold. “ Wa-hoo-o-O’, wa-hoo-o-o, 77 we hear sung 
from the lips of the Shepherd, and if we do not 
turn homeward the Good Shepherd comes and folds 
the tenderest lambs to his bosom and hears them 
over the rocks safe again into the soft meadow 
grass. And at evening we start on the journey 
home,—and the paths are smooth and straight. 
Once I was summering in the valley of Virginia, 
in the high picturesque hills about Luray, and there 
was a rough, rocky road that led to the town. My 
host said to me as we rumbled over an exceedingly 
rough road, “ Do you notice how hard travelling we 
have on this piece of road? Often Colonel Blank 
visits here with his invalid wife, and whenever she 
is to make a trip to the town, the colonel spends all 
of the preceding day in the blazing sun picking 
these stones out of the road that his wife might 
have a smooth path to travel to the city/ 7 

That is the figure of the Good Shepherd. He 
has worn his fingers to the bones picking out the 
stones and rocks and snares that his own sheep 
might have a smooth path to find their way back to 
the cross. These paths are not sharp, rough ways 
that bruise the feet and lacerate the body, not paths, 
the thickets of whose sides are beset by the glaring 
eye of the marauder, but they are paths of safety, 
which we follow with assurance because we know 
the name of our leader. A name in the Scripture 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


100 

stands for three things. A character, a person, a 
plea. He leads us in paths of righteousness be¬ 
cause of His character, because our God is a holy 
God, and because He is a holy God, His moral good¬ 
ness changeth not. He leads us in the right way by 
His hand, for His perfect purity is become infinite 
power to keep us in the path of love. A name also 
stands for a person. “ Wherefore God hath highly 
exalted Him and given Him a name which is above 
every name. 7 ’ For His name’s sake, He personally 
leads us along life’s journey. And a name stands 
for a plea. Paul pleaded that he was a Roman. 
Our plea is, “ Nothing in my hand I bring, siniply 
to thy cross I cling.” He leads me in paths of 
righteousness because my plea is “ 0 Lord, thou art 
my Shepherd, lead me on.” 

“ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me: thy rod 
and thy staff they comfort me. 

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine 
enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth 
over.” 

The day was waning, the sun was set and the 
purple twilight had come over the singer. It is 
easier to trust in the darkness than in the light, for 
we want something to lean upon then; but it is 
hard, very hard, to follow the Shepherd when we 
can barely see him in the vale of shades. Peter 
followed his Lord afar off when he was taken 
prisoner, but that was human nature more than sin¬ 
fulness. When the way to Jerusalem is green with 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


101 

palm branches, and white with discarded garments, 
and the air is vibrant with the chorus, “ Hosannah 
to the son of David. Blessed is he that cometh in 
the name of the Lord/’ it is easy to sing with the 
multitude. But when the night is cold and the 
light is dim and the court is ablaze with the fire of 
hatred against your best friend, it is hard to follow 
a crownless king to his judgment. David had 
passed through the gorges but never fails to trust 
though brought low to earth: 

“ If I stoop 

Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 

It is but for a time; I press God’s lamp 
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late, 

Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge one day.” 

Here again is a picture. The dark is coming 
over the flock. They come close to the Shepherd. 
Sometimes in the sombre silence there is heard 
alone the heavy tramp of the sandal of the Shepherd 
and the hundred footsteps of the sheep. How the 
frightened sheep hear the thumping of their quick¬ 
ened heartbeats, the flowing of the stream through 
the ravine, the crumpling of twigs and leaves, the 
crashing of a branch, are magnified into great 
perils. The yelping of hungry wolves, the flashing 
eyes of the prowling beasts, the passing into the 
dark places, try the sheep to keep near their 
Shepherd leader, but they are not fearful, for the 
strong staff of the Shepherd beats back the beast, 
and his rod draws back again the straggler to the 


102 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


path. The sheep are conscious of their Shepherd’s 
care and presence. 

“Only Heaven is better than to walk 
With Christ at midnight over moonless seas.” 

Now in the fifth verse many hold that the figure 
changes to that of a host and his guest. The Psalm¬ 
ist changes his figure thrice they say:—Jehovah as 
a provider; Jehovah as a guide, and Jehovah as a 
host. The figure is one though its phases change. 
The psalm is a poem and from the point of view 
of art, idyllic construction will admit of hut the 
one figure, though this is capable of development 
as the Psalmist does. 

The Lord as a Shepherd is the figure, and the 
banquet is introduced to dignify the sheep. Even 
when the wolves are on the plateau and the thieves 
in the thickets are planning about their fires, the 
good shepherd gives his sheep protection just as a 
host must give his guests protection. Thou anoint- 
est my head with oil, and thou dost put balm upon 
the galled places, thou anointest the head of the 
sheep with oil to mitigate the sun’s rays, just as 
the host anoints his guest and my cup, the cup of 
the sheep, as the cup of the guest, is full to over¬ 
flowing. Here the danger of the deep valley, the 
sharp spear of the enemy, and the sunlight of ad¬ 
versity, hut the psalmist sings of plenty and trust 
that waneth not. This valley is not death, but it 
is that valley through which you often pass with 


THE LYRIC OF OLD AGE 


103 


heavy heart and crushed spirit. This table is 
spread in the dark cave whence we flee those who 
seek our soul to devour it, from which Hope seeth 
no star. This sun is the livid heat upon the white 
desert sand “ a dry and thirsty land where no water 
is.” But the Shepherd is there in the valley watch¬ 
ing, in the cave providing, and in the desert bring¬ 
ing joy. Oh, the joy of knowing that our Shepherd 
is near! I was once in a home in the Wissahickon 
section and a little girl and I became the fastest of 
chums, and once when I had been preparing for 
the evening meal, she came running into my room 
just as I turned out the light. Immediately she 
was frightened and cried out in her distress. But 
I reassured her and reached for her groping hand, 
I found it and folded it in mine. And as she held 
ever so tight my hand she said, “ Oh, it is all right 
now,” and the dark of that room was as the light 
of day to her. 

“ We older children grope our way 

From the dark behind to the dark before 
And only when our hands we lay, 

Dear Lord, in thine, the night is day 
And there is darkness nevermore.” 

And now the postlude. Gray mist is filling the 
meadow-land, and the shepherd with his flock is 
retreating over the hill. The lyre is silent, the 
singer has ceased his song—but yonder on the pur¬ 
ple hilltops the sunlight still lingers and hope 
swiftly moving sees through the veil of the present 


104 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


and the lyre breaks out in a melody divine and the 
psalmist sings: 

“ Surely goodness and mercy 
Shall follow me all the days of my life.” 

Ah, this matter of resting well, in the Courts of 
the Eternities! The goodness of God is what He 
does for us, objectively. His mercy is what lies 
in His heart of hearts. The full want of many of 
us is not met by the abundance of good things, but 
our yearning spirits must reach upward and out¬ 
ward until we feel the nature of our God answering 
and satisfying. These subjective convictions 
within us are but the correlatives of the fact that 
Jesus is the Good Shepherd; the objective fact of 
the Christ is the fulfillment of our subjective hope. 
Man’s supremest delight is felt when God and man 
are met together, when goodness and mercy “ kiss 
each other.” This is the vision of the true mystic 
who is caught up into paradise and hears words 
unlawful for man to utter, “ I shall dwell in the 
house of the Lord forever.” 

“ If thou art worn and hard beset 
With sorrows that thou wouldst forget.” 

I am sure you and I may read this Shepherd 
Psalm and be satisfied, may we not? I am sure 
that when our lives are tuneless and we long for 
melody, we shall come to this Psalm and place our 
ear close to the shepherd’s harp and hear him sing. 
Shall we not go away with a firmer faith and a 
surer trust ? I am sure we shall, shall we not ? 


X 


THE CONSECRATION OF CHANGE 

“ Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not 
God.” — Psalm 55:19. 

“ Meddle not yyith them, that are given to change ”— 
Pbo verbs 24:21. 

T HE only world factor that has not changed 
in the last century is the church. Science 
of to-day could not he identified by the 
science of a century ago. The drift of govern¬ 
ments toward democracy has come in the later 
years. Pure food legislation, control of industry 
and transportation have changed the entire field of 
commerce. The common demand for reform in 
political life has brought a new personnel into the 
senate chambers. The church alone has. failed to 
put itself to the consecration of change. It has not 
even allowed itself to look into its own affairs. The 
church has not become scummed by stagnation, hut 
it has lulled itself into the complacency of casting 
no shadow by reason of change. There is a conse¬ 
cration in complacency as well as a consecration in 
change. Who would doubt the noble consecration 
of John Calvin while consigning infants to hell, or 
of preachers of a half century ago in the fervent 

defense of slavery, or the none the less honest con- 

105 


106 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


secration of church, members in this day who com¬ 
placently postponed national prohibition of the 
liquor traffic because the loss in revenue would be 
unsettling? But we have fallen upon a day that 
calls us to the everlasting principle of change, the 
attitude of tolerant expectancy of development in 
every world factor afield, the devotion to the duty 
of deviating when the unseen forces of heaven and 
earth are making a new North Star and a corre¬ 
sponding compass. It is a peril to follow a stand¬ 
ard compass when conditions which have made pos¬ 
sible the standard are in the hands of heaven and 
the fingers of God are setting new points in the 
firmament above and through the tides below. 

The Crisis of Change 

They fear not God who have no changes, for God 
has changed. First revealing himself in the glory¬ 
showing stars, and then dedicating himself to a new 
policy he called Abraham to be the prophet of the 
Invisible, and still again he chose the Christ and 
the Cross to make perfect what manner of God he 
is. This was the Changeless Jehovah’s consecra¬ 
tion to change. These crises come to nations, woo¬ 
ing them to change. A crisis came to Israel when 
they became international, and their neighbours had 
kings. The crisis was the chance to build a de¬ 
mocracy under the fear of God over all or fall into 
the complacent custom of having a king. They 
failed of their chance, and even to this day the 


THE CONSECRATION OF CHANGE 107 


world is wearying of the kings that Israel chose. 
A king is a symbol of a nation’s consecration to 
complacency. 

Had not the crisis of a change come long before 
Luther to the Roman Church ? Had not Huss and 
Wyclif flung new stars of ecclesiasticism in the 
heavens? Had not the compass points been mag¬ 
netized by the new unfettering of the mind ? Had 
not the freshly placarded lanes through the ocean 
beckoned men to travel to new worlds ? All the 
while the Church burned men at the stake, tortured 
them with thumbscrews, and gloried in its com¬ 
placent consecration. But climbing the Sancta 
Scala, the open-souled monk saw the crisis of the 
Church and dedicated himself to the consecration 
of change, consuming himself with the best visions 
of his time, which, however, long ago ceased to 
satisfy the best visions of our time, for the world 
falls with frequency upon the crisis of change. 

Columbus dreaming of worlds and worming his 
way through musty hooks of discovery came to the 
crisis of hugging the white fringes of the coast or 
opening his sails by faith to the breezes of a wide 
and uncharted sea. His voyage was the consecra¬ 
tion to change in the science of sailing the seas. 
And none the less to the souls of men the crisis of 
change is ever calling. The earth has fallen upon 
this crisis in a war. Where doth the soul of man 
seek to find itself to-day? In the complacency of 
the old landmarks of wealth and academics and 


108 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


might, or in a new consecration to change to good¬ 
ness rather than gold, to intellectualism with sym¬ 
pathy rather than to the cold pride of learning, or 
to the gentleness of living rather than to the bluster 
of plumes? 

The soul must oftentimes turn suddenly on the 
devil of complacency and thrust in his face the 
“ everlasting nay/’ if it is to enter with consecra¬ 
tion into the path that divides at the cross-roads of 
the crisis of change. 

The Challenge of Change 

They have no changes because they fear not God. 
Only brave men fear God; the faint in heart fear 
folks. Changes come to those alone who have a 
changeless faith in God. I venture to question 
whether a single church existing to-day fears God 
pre-eminently. They fear lest their fame shall 
dim, or their pastor shall not yield to their com¬ 
placencies, or that they must hear dull homilies. 
So they cling to their traditions and customs. 
Brother Luther feared God and took up the chal¬ 
lenge of a changed creed. Erasmus set upon the 
policy of trimming his sails to the winds. But 
Luther’s ship sailed into the unknown waters de¬ 
spite the winds. The Royal Youth, leaping in 
eagerness to win life’s greatest quest, faltered when 
Jesus said, “ Sell all and follow where fearless 
faith leads.” The challenge of a great change had 

i 


THE CONSECRATION OF CHANGE 109 


found a sorrowful refusal in a rich, royal and 
righteous faint-at-heart. 

In a Boston burial ground there is an enclosed 
grave lot. The iron fence is warping and rusting 
and crumbling after only seventy years. On the 
iron gateway to the lot is moulded the caption, 
“ Never to he disturbed/’ the epitaph of a timor¬ 
ously complacent soul fearful of the world he was 
leaving behind. The challenge to change has come 
to the church. Soldiers of the Great Upheaval are 
accepting the challenge, and are finding the Christ 
of the highway crucifix to he the Christ of a guile¬ 
less experience in a changed viewpoint of life. It 
is the new birth of a changed heart. There need 
he no anxious moments as to what the soldiers did 
with the New Testaments that the churches sent 
them. Better he anxious to keep a companion 
Testament for each one sent abroad and read it our¬ 
selves lest we be unfamiliar with the helping spirit 
and the sacrificial sacraments that its pages uncov¬ 
ered to the men overseas. The complacent critics 
of the soldiers’ morals are running after will-o’-the- 
wisps. “ They are chasing fireflies in the valleys, 
while the men over there in France are on the 
heights, face to face with the stars and with God.” 

To-day I looked on th^ fearless sea, its tide ever 
changing, itself unchanged. The sand dunes, too, 
were unafraid, defiant of the winds, though blown 
from defense to defense in changing ridges. Along 
the shallow beach the “ silver shiners ” were swim- 


110 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


ming, and with the resurging tide were caught un¬ 
alert and stranded. How frantic is the struggle 
as this one beats its body on the wet sand in an 
effort to swim back into the changing tide. Alas! 
it is left alone in the sun in silvered silence. Its 
tide has gone out. Fancy sees the drama of a heed¬ 
less conservative or an adventuresome liberal in the 
church pew, or maybe in the pulpit, or some doctor 
in the schools of the churches, who has the compla¬ 
cent habit of swimming in the shallows. He is now 
perilously near a resurging tide. The changing 
waves wait not to enfold his shining theories to its 
bosom, but leave him upon the strand of the change¬ 
less sea. The challenge to God-fearing, thinking 
leaders of men is the challenge to change. The 
truths of God are the unchanging sea; its tides our 
petty faiths. 

The church too long has practised the complacent 
custom of laying up its great wealth. Its boasted 
and boastful underwriters are serenely rich, but 
this war has challenged all men to make secure not 
by intrinsic investments, but to lay up treasure by 
laying out treasure. “ The soldiers and sailors are 
giving their bodies, they are giving their sight, 
everything but their souls—those they are not giv¬ 
ing, but finding.” The church must give less of 
censure and more of forgetting; less of pride and 
pretense and more of penitent prayer; less of secur¬ 
ing and more of scattering; less of the fear of their 
fellows and more of the fear of God. 


THE CONSECRATION OF CHANGE 111 


In these latter years we have sought to spin a 
theological and ecclesiastical web about the church 
crammed by our dogmas into a cocoon of our own 
making. But the challenge of an awakening morn 
is warming the church to its new life, the chrysalis 
is stirring and he who listens now can hear the 
crackling of its wings. The church is changing its 
winter’s sleep for fearless flight. 

The Consecration of Change 

We have always thought of consecration as a 
heroic allegiance to the forms of Christianity—a 
consecration that never missed a church service, 
and walked miles through winter and summer to a 
class of boys and gave liberally out of a scanty 
store, enough to rival the gifts of the rich. Our 
standards of consecration have been cast about the 
virtue of doggedly holding on. 

A new crisis flings the challenge to change—the 
virtue of letting go—as the new standard of conse¬ 
cration. Some things must always he held tightly; 
some things must be held lightly. Consecration 
yesterday was a quality found chiefly in those who 
were able to see. To-day one’s consecration must 
be able to sever. To leave the wharves to which we 
have always moored our ships and face uncertain 
winds and tempests is the unrelenting challenge to 
the new consecration. Preachers have known all 
along that few were giving ear to their words, but 
it was of little concern to us because we lived in 



112 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


the triumphant hope of getting along somehow. 
We all believed the world would get on its way 
whether the preacher carried his point or not. But 
after to-day, after this war of great and epochal 
change, if the preacher gets back to his point it will 
make a difference—a tragic matter whether the 
complacent congregation listen to him or not. The 
difference will be the difference between vines with 
figs, and crackling twigs. I am sure that an un¬ 
awakened church in this great day will be a church 
impotent to mould its generation for a century to 
come. The church will continue to exist like the 
feeble folks of the incurable wards. Death will not 
prevail, but the pity of the invalidism! 

To what manner of change must the church 
dedicate its new career? We may be sure the 
church will never be asked to give up a single truth 
it has ever held, but its creeds have not always been 
its truths. Certainly, first of all, there must come 
from the church a new emphasis on applied Chris¬ 
tianity. This emphasis will be to exalt the emo¬ 
tional side of Christianity rather than its scholas¬ 
tic philosophy. This noble word “ emotion ” really 
means “ to set on the move.” France gave to 
Europe the university and the crusade, not because 
the university caused the crusade, but because the 
soul of a crusade gives to a nation the right to 
found a school. Christianity’s passion lies not in 
weeping, but in working under its own enthusiasm. 
Who cares—and much less does God care—for a 


THE CONSECRATION OF CHANGE 113 


teacher in a classroom who knows all the facts, but 
never dreams of the power to warm his facts into 
enthusiasm by the glow of a flaming heart? The 
new consecration is the change from indifference to 
initiating sympathy; from a monastery cell to the 
market-places of human simplicities; from the 
learned professor to the learning prophet; out from 
the academies to walk the highways of men, and 
love and live and learn and laugh. 

The Christian church will he beaten to its knees 
unless it drops voluntarily upon them and questions 
its own spiritual integrity. There is perhaps not a 
single church in the world with more than half its 
efficients utilized. The discipline of armies will 
teach the church to account for all of its resources. 
Our new consecration will sever the broken limbs, 
the empty branches, the bland leaves spreading 
themselves along fruitless houghs and cast them 
into a tempest of hurtling flames, even consuming 
the motes of the atmosphere until it is clean. Love 
will do it; the honest spirit of inherent inquisition 
will do it. The world will pale at the splendours 
of the church purged of half its slacking professors, 
having rediscovered its power to speak and com¬ 
mand attention, to move together and mould the 
universe to its benignant will, offering no apology 
for its existence, making no defense of its integrity, 
hut gathering the earth at its feet by captivating 
charm of its spiritual fervour. 

The Changeless Christ—the same yesterday, and 


114 1 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


to-day, and forever—becomes through the centuries 
the Changing Christ. As his eternal brotherhood 
is enshrined in the hearts of all the nations, Christ 
is formed in us, shining through and transforming 
into his own image the Indian disciple, the Congo 
devotee, the Korean priest, the scout of the plains, 
the English statesman, the princes of the tribes of 
men. 

But this unchanging inter-racial bond—the life 
of all men everywhere—has come to another crisis, 
that out of a tragic war, challenges the world to 
lead to oneness the ever-changing in triumphant 
anthem about the throne of the Changeless Christ. 



XI 


THE CHARM OF THE UNCHANGING 

“ If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare 
himself to the battle .”—I Cor. 14:8. 

r—\HE World War taught us bow very easily 
can tbe God of War change his shining 
L glamour to ghastly grayness. We learned 
in the wonder days of childhood that War rode on 
a prancing steed, and he brandished a gleaming 
sword, and helmet was shone never so bright as his; 
but we have learned that the last few years have 
unvisored his ugly face, and we know now he wields 
a sword red with blood and his helmet is old with 
rust, and he rides upon a dragon breathing from 
his nostrils poisoned gas and the breath of hell. 
War has taught us to change our worship of the 
God of War and wave him adieu forever. But the 
war has taught us to sound afresh a note of cer¬ 
tainty in trumpeting this age to re-establish its 
faith in those verities which are unchanged and un¬ 
changing. 

Vast strata in the structure of the world’s civil¬ 
ization have been shifted by the events among the 
nations in this time. Nations have trembled in 
fear of ruin, monarchs have grown pale at the 

stalking figure of world democracy. The Church 

115 


& 


116 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


itself, in moments of the world’s worst paroxysms 
has been charged with failure, and weakness, and 
pathetic invalidism. These years have been years 
of uncertainty in the world’s thinking, unrest in 
faith, disquietude in the State, uneasiness in the 
pulpit, and anxious care has all but corroded the 
heart of Christianity itself. Men have strung 
aeolian harps across the windows of their houses, 
waiting for the fugitive winds of the world to heat 
out some kind of a melody that would bring to them 
once again the charm of peace and security, but the 
music has been fitful and discordant and uncertain. 
What this age of man has been longing for is a 
trumpet’s blast, the unmistakable note of a bugle 
sound, calling the world back to faith and founda¬ 
tions, to God and truth and hope and heaven, to 
Christ and the certainty of the triumph of Chris¬ 
tianity. We are longing now for a return of the 
charm that lends itself to the unchanging. This is 
not a time when mere declaration of dogma palli¬ 
ates the anxieties of men, but our day is a clear 
challenge for men to review and renew their con¬ 
victions on some of the fundamental problems of 
the ages. Christianity with its great fundamental 
doctrines of life is not even obscured by the red 
mists that rise out of the trenches of the European 
war; Christianity is secure, unassailable, increas¬ 
ingly unimpeachable. Far and away above the con¬ 
fusion of our day, Christianity is closing up to its 
day of glory. 


THE CHARM OF THE UNCHANGING 117 


The Changing Centuries 
In the present age science has opened the door 
of Nature’s Arcanum and discoveries have so rap¬ 
idly been flashed on the dull mind of the world that 
the world has grown confused. 44 If present-day 
conclusions in science flatly contradict the conclu¬ 
sions of science fifty years ago, what of the uncer¬ 
tain future days ” ? the bewildered man is asking. 
“ If we were frightened by Charles Darwin in his 
marvelous researches and observations, how shall 
we get back to the great note of certainty that blasts 
out of the first verse of our Book of Faith: 4 In 
the beginning, God created heaven and earth ’ ? ” 
Such are the questions that have made our day a 
day of nervous and fickle uncertainties. The dis¬ 
covery of the germ theory of disease sent our win¬ 
dows wide open for the cure of tuberculosis, where 
the windows had been closed before to retain a 
stifling and stale air which we thought was soothing 
to the diseased lungs. The science of pedagogy 
came into our classrooms and changed entirely and 
fundamentally our age-long method of 44 learning 
how to read,” and we stood aghast. By the study 
of the great spiritual verities of Jesus’ teaching, 
our age has abandoned largely the fire of hell, hut 
has substituted for the burning flames a spiritual 
fire ten thousand times more fearful than fire. 
Science has taught us the certainty of the truth, 
44 Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 


118 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


reap.’ 7 More changes have occurred in the last 
quarter of a century in the United States than in 
the entire period from Washington to Lincoln. In 
a day when the ancient Chinese has clipped his pig¬ 
tails, and railroads are threading like silver wires 
the entire country of the long hermit-secluded 
world, when the national kimono is giving way to 
the militant khaki and the Chinese Empire has 
flowered into the fair blossom of a modern republic, 
certainly the world has gone topsy-turvy and the 
age in which we find ourselves has become an age 
of uncertainty. 

With Emmanuel Kant asserting that the only 
things we can ever really know are things as they 
appear to us and we can never be sure that the ap¬ 
pearance is the same as reality, and with Hegel 
declaring, with the adoption by many new cults of 
our day, that there is no reality beyond appearance, 
our age is a clamour for the note of certainty of be¬ 
lief in the Bible as the Word of the Living God, in 
Jesus the world’s sufficient Saviour, and for a calm¬ 
ing of the spirit of unrest into a spirit of confidence 
and quietness in the unmovable, unimpeachable 
truth of Christianity as its final and unfailing 
truth. The roots of uncertainty run down, after 
all, into the spirit of man and the most profound 
truths of man lie in the realm of faith, not reason; 
in the realm of the soul, not in the classrooms of 
man’s understanding. 


THE CHARM OF THE UNCHANGING 119 


The Integrity of the Book 

In the last fifty years the Bible has been under 
fire and crossfire. In the light of its vital message 
to-day, in the light of its unstained integrity, in the 
light of its note of certainty with which the trumpet 
blasts of the Bible sets forth its authority. “ In 
the beginning God,” no disciple of the most scul¬ 
lion-like understanding need have a fear of the 
failure of this Book. 

The mad God of War has taken time from feed¬ 
ing on the red pulp of four million dead soldiers 
to grant an armistice to the friends of the Bible, 
and in every trench, under the rude sleeping bunks, 
in the crannies of the earth, in the knapsack of sol¬ 
dier and on the white covering of hospital beds, the 
Bible to-day has gone hack to the uprooted growth 
of civilization to re-establish the world in the God 
of the Book and the Christ of the Cross. 

One sign of the unsettled age in which we live 
is the growing tendency to put all world religions 
upon the same plane of value. Men in their un¬ 
easiness and, indeed, in their silly truckling and 
seeming tolerance, are summoning us to the lofty 
ethics of Confucius and the beautiful mysticism of 
Buddha and the practical values of Judaism. To 
he sure, there is a proper challenge in the study of 
comparative religions, and when Jacob Chamber- 
lain, that careful appreciative student of religions 
of the East, had disclosed one day in Madras some 
of the finest sentiments of the Eastern religions, a 


120 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


Brahman arose and said, “ Sir, whence did you cull 
all these beautiful utterances ? I never knew our 
Vedas and our poets contained such gems,” and the 
old Christian teacher then said, u He knew not the 
weeks of patient toil required in searching through 
bushels of rubbish to find those pearls.” Compara¬ 
tive religions but emphasize the matchless worth of 
Jesus as the world’s one Redeemer from Sin. The 
legend is told of Lucifer, the fallen angel, that 
when they asked him what he most missed of every¬ 
thing in heaven whence he had been cast out, he 
cried, “ I miss most the sound of the trumpets in 
the mornings.” The note of uncertainty which has 
crept into the religious thinking of both pulpit and 
pew in our day is, doubtless, leaving the bewildered 
laymen to wonder whether to expect an eclipse of 
the Christ as the one necessary and irrefutable 
refuge of the human soul. 

The Available Saviour 
If Jesus is not the only Saviour of the world, 
our great, sad world has fallen upon a hopeless 
estate. If Buddha can offer salvation to the great 
race of men, we need build our hopes for a social 
order no higher than the industrial mill system of 
Japan, -where eighty per cent of the girls under 
fifteen years of age are driven into the mill com¬ 
pounds to grind out an existence at the wheels. 
Sixty per cent of them either die in the nameless 
insanitation of the mill housings or go into a life 


THE CHARM OF THE UNCHANGING 121 


of ill-repute. Forty per cent return home, but 
either maimed for life or physically unfit for fur¬ 
ther labour. NTever a voice of protest rises from 
the best religion that Japan can boast. If Con¬ 
fucius, after twenty-three hundred years has a mes¬ 
sage for the world, America can dream of no higher 
conception of womanhood than that her women can 
have no destiny here or hereafter except as she is 
allied to man. Jesus has made His matchless 
march through the centuries, “ the light that came 
to lighten every man that cometh into the world;’’ 
before Him darkness has slipped away and the na¬ 
tions have had a great light to shine upon them, 
not a single pathway down which He has led His 
people has either been infested with thorns in its 
hedges or beset by stones in the way, the heavens 
before Him have been spangled with stars of hope 
to every people, and His claim to be “ the bread 
that came down from heaven,” “ the Water of Life 
whereof if a man drinketh, he shall never thirst,” 
the challenge to the weary “ to come unto Him and 
find rest,” and finally, His divine declaration that 
“ I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, no 
man cometh unto the Father but by Me.”—These 
mighty claims unimpeached, proven without a 
shadow of a doubt, remaining—by the cumulative 
experience of His disciples from the Hill of Gol¬ 
gotha to the scarred battle-fields of the present day 
—mark Jesus as the world’s only refuge from sin. 
Poor, blighted, broken, bruised, ravaged, wrecked, 



122 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


vagrant and vanquished humanity find in Jesus 
Christ their certainty of trust and faith and 
salvation. 


The Crusading Church 
One of the greatest marks of a superficial and 
drifting age is the frantic and feverish clamour 
after institutionalism in religion. To-day they are 
clouding the issue of the Christ and its pre-eminent 
importance in the life of the centuries by the 
nebulous multitudinous forms of institutions for 
social service apart from and semi-hostile to the 
Church of Jesus Christ. We cannot substitute the 
settlement house that is built on the religion which 
may be found in a cake of soap for the unconquer¬ 
able Church which is the sponsor of the sinewy 
faith that vitalizes all service to man or God. The 
Church is finding herself to-day to be a Church of 
the open eye and the reaching hand and the lifting 
heart. The bad air that breathes out of the dingy 
cubicle of the tenement house is calling to-day like 
the winds of God for the Christian tenement-house 
owner to right his wrongs; the long hours and 
double-up strain of big business stenographers are 
putting into the hand of the preacher of our day a 
lash by which he is breaking the unreasoning will 
of the Church officer, who, for the toil of business 
efficiency sets his Christianity on a vacation from 
Monday morning to Saturday night. The Church 
has no countenance for Christianity which is not 


THE CHARM OF THE UNCHANGING 123 


applied Christianity. Without the Church, social 
conditions would fester and humanitarian cults 
and nondescript sects would fag into such spineless 
vitality that protest would thin away into desue¬ 
tude. 

The Church needs no apologists to-day. The 
Christian ministry need not offer a brief for its 
trumpet note. Carlyle has summed it up for our 
age. “ I wish he could find the point again, this 
speaking one, and stick to it with tenacity, with 
deadly energy, for there is need of him yet.” 

The Church has lighted every light that lines the 
dark streets of our city; the Church has cleansed 
every reeking alley that has been transformed into 
a boulevard of commerce. The Church has given 
bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, a lint 
bandage to the wounded, heaven to the hopeless and 
a burial for the dead. This age has its ear still 
open to the changeless message of the prophet of 
the Church of the Living God. “ Inasmuch as ye 
do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do 
it unto me.” 

The nervous, unanchored faith of our day is con¬ 
tinually finding expression in such cults and sects 
and theological extravaganzas as would offer a 
panacea for all sin when the only panacea is the 
forgiving grace of God. Again the illogical theor¬ 
ist would wave away sin as non-existent, while all 
the time his sermons direct us how to be rid of its 
effects. 


124’ 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


The Unchanging Christ 

I do not hesitate to sound the note of the cer¬ 
tainty of sin as the most terrible fact in the his¬ 
tory of the souls of men, and the Unchanging Christ 
alone is able to break its power. Whether sin be 
the gross shattering of the laws of God or of man; 
whether it be the willful closing of the soul to the 
challenge of opportunity to be one’s best, or whether 
“ sin is behoovable,” as Julian of Norwich has 
said, the great fact remains that the universal ex¬ 
perience of the native in the undiscovered thicket 
of the savage tribe, to Heine the brilliant, the de¬ 
fiant, the master of irony, is ever the same experi¬ 
ence, for when Heine, prone upon his “ mattress 
of gray,” suffered undescribed agony, feeling that 
he was forsaken by God, he exclaimed, “At last, I 
have to stand on the same footing with Uncle 
Tom.” 

After all, out of our uncertainties remains the 
certainty of Jesus of Nazareth, the world’s all- 
embracing Redeemer. Let us go back to the apos¬ 
tasy of man and find him even guilty in possession 
of infinite possibilities and he still remains the 
creature for whom Jehovah can never disavow a 
divine responsibility, for in the process of man’s 
being made our God cannot escape His account¬ 
ability for the making; back of the apostasy to the 
external silences, then to the creative fiat and the 
birth of man, and through the years of the victory 
of Satan, and on still through the long years of the 


THE CHARM OF THE UNCHANGING 125 


toiling hand and sweating brow, through years of 
conflict with the tempter, through the desert of de¬ 
spair to the promise of a Saviour flashed out of the 
soul of prophets and fulfilled in the advent at Beth¬ 
lehem, and on through His life, His death, His 
burial and His resurrection, through the years of 
the triumphant Church, heating at the gates of hell, 
then onward through the drawn veil, to the gates 
of pearl, to the multitude whose garments are 
white, washed in the blood of the Lamb, who have 
come up through much tribulation to the great 
white throne and to the Son of Man seated on the 
right hand of Majesty, and this is the vindication 
of our note of uncertainty, the justification of our 
creed, the proof of our confession: “ Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the Living God.” This is the 
matchless charm of the Unchanging Christ. 


XII 


THE FORGOTTEN PRINCESS 

“And she called his name Moses, and she said, Because 1 
drew him out of the water .”— Exodus 2:10. 

O NE of the sublimest moments in the his¬ 
tory of man was the moment when hu¬ 
manity climbed to the heights of Sinai 
and bore back two tablets of stone upon which God’s 
own finger had written the Ten Commandments, 
and Moses was humanity’s messenger, and the com¬ 
missioner of Jehovah—but the great hour had not 
been possible but for Pharaoh’s daughter—the For¬ 
gotten Princess. Moses was the mighty man of a 
mighty moment, while the Princess, doubtless, with 
her household, lay tumbled in a sandy sepulchre at 
the bottom of the Red Sea. 

Kings have marched their way to miracles of 
glory, moved to deeds by their mothers of the ob¬ 
scure cottage ; authors have written words deathless 
and winsome, sustained by the unfaltering faith of 
a true wife. And whether it be an unmarried elder 
sister, or some daughter of drudgery, the glamour 
of great men traces back its source times without 

number, to the heroism of some Eorgotten Princess. 

126 


THE FORGOTTEN PRINCESS 


127 


The Wail of a Baby 

The drama of an afternoon’s bath by the royal 
daughter, marks the beginning of the law-giver’s 
life. The cruel Pharaoh had commanded the male 
children killed; a mother’s heart had formed a 
thousand ways to hide her son, and now despair¬ 
ing, she thrust a floating ark, made with her hands 
of love, out upon the river of chance, and God’s 
overlooking eye and the well-timed presence of 
Miriam, the baby’s sister, and the afternoon bath of 
the Princess, all conspired to make Moses the 
leader of the chosen people of Israel, wdiose fade¬ 
less glory has written maybe the one golden chap¬ 
ter in the history of mankind. It was the wail of 
a child that brought the dramatic discovery of 
Moses. It was a baby’s cry that set to throbbing 
the multitudinous impulses of the Princess’ mother 
heart. 


“ An infant crying in the night, 

An infant crying for the light, 

And with no language but a cry,” 

has oft been the call of God that brought a mother’s 
heart to fold its wings about an orphaned child. 
A woman’s heart always finds the range of vibra¬ 
tion when a baby wails. God-given instinct of our 
mothers that so subtlely discovers the meaning of 
a baby’s cry! A mother, a wife, a watching little 
girl, quickly reads the meaning of a sob of sorrow, 
or the whine of sickness, or the scream of anger, 


128 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


the cry of pain, or the whimper of a little lonely 
heart, homesick for its absent mother. 

When Luther sang his carols on the streets of 
Eisenach, Erau Cotta, flinging wide open her win¬ 
dows, perceived with her mother’s sensitive soul the 
cry of hunger in the song of the disconsolate lad; 
and Luther remains forever the Great Reformer, 
and Frau Cotta the long Forgotten Princess. 

Rugged Bill Nicoll has been a preacher now for 
thirty years, hut once he had left his home and 
wife and babies in Baltimore to direct the traffic 
of San Francisco’s horse-drawn street cars; and 
there came once to him a night of homesickness and 
a weariness of toil as he wandered from his task 
in the dusk of California’s afterglow. And sud¬ 
denly a lighted lamp became to him a beacon 
through the window-panes, and the laughter of 
children in their evening games a challenge, and 
the wail of a baby, called out as the voice of God, 
to the lone-hearted pilgrim and flashing a decision 
to leave his work and seek the circle of his own 
home, now stretched continent-wide away from his 
aching heart. Bill Nicoll came, guided by a baby’s 
cry, back to home, and to Moody’s tabernacle, and 
to God, and to the shepherd’s robes, and the throb¬ 
bing heart of a saint. 

Wherever there is a mother with a wailing baby 
there is the benediction of Bethlehem. Wherever 
a son hangs upon a cross and a mother watches 
through the darkness, there is a Calvary. 


THE FORGOTTEN PRINCESS 


129 


The Deputies of Our Destinies 

The destiny of Moses was written by Jehovah 
long, long before the first day-dawn flung its red 
streamers across a world of chaos, but the deputy 
into whose keeping was thrust the opening act was 
the Forgotten Princess. 

Men rise from dirt floors to hew out the high¬ 
ways of state’s and nation’s march; to heroisms 
that prove the soul of men unconquerable and im¬ 
perishable; their destinies read like romances en¬ 
acted in personalities of brain and brawn, but the 
unceasing miracle of motherhood has been the 
deputy that God summoned to take his task in¬ 
stead. Witness George Herbert crying out, “ A 
good mother is worth a hundred school-masters;” f i 
and John Henry Jowett seeking the secret of 
destiny in his words, “ I would prefer the early 
guidance of an illumined father and mother to the \ 
instruction of all state teachers and official priests 
of Christendom;” and Saint Augustine in his con¬ 
fessions humbly finding the hand that had led him 
hitherto, “ If I am thy child, 0 my God, it is be¬ 
cause thou gavest me such a mother.” 

Nathaniel Hawthorne caught in the typhoon of 
a political upheaval had lost his post as surveyor of 
the port of Salem, Massachusetts, and leaving be¬ 
hind his humdrum desk and uninspiring task by the 
which he had eked an existence for himself and 
wife, he turned to tell her of the disaster that had 
left him hopeless and despondent. “ I am without 


130 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


work,” lie told her, “ the government has changed.” 
And she smiled upon his broken spirit and simply 
lighted the fire and secured a fountain of ink and 
clean paper and his pen, and thus she whispered to 
him, “ Now write your hook of the scarlet sin of 
the woman and the village minister. Happy is this 
release to show your genius.” And Hawthorne 
toiled and told his story and captivated the Ameri¬ 
can public and then all of the English-speaking race 
with his novel of “ The Scarlet Letter.” But the 
Forgotten Princess had been deputized to work out 
the destiny with a smile of faith and the courage 
of hope. 


Tiie Companion of Our Careers 
The Princess taught Moses all the learning of 
the Egyptians, and while he “ refused to he called 
the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to 
suffer afflictions with the people of God than to 
enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,” it doubt¬ 
less was the over-caring companionship of the Prin¬ 
cess that kept the boy Moses close to the discipline 
of books. 

Charles Lamb’s immortal lines to Coleridge tells 
afresh the story of his mother’s companionship in 
his career. “ Oh, my friend! I think sometimes 
could I recall the days that are past, which among 
them should I choose? Not those terrier days/ 
not ‘ the pleasant days of hope/ not ‘ those wander¬ 
ings with a fair-haired maid/ which I have so often 


THE FORGOTTEN PRINCESS 


131 


and so feelingly regretted; but the days, Coleridge, 
of a mother’s fondness for her schoolboy. What 
would I give to call her hack for one day, on my 
knees, to ask her pardon for all those little asperi¬ 
ties of temper, which from time to time have given 
her gentle spirit pain! ” 

What picturesqueness gathers itself about the 
forgotten Princess of the parsonage; the preacher’s 
wife! Time soon comes when the new preacher 
grows “ dull,” and they say “ he lacks the human 
note,” and still others whisper “ he is commonplace 
like the rest,” and in a short year after the preacher 
and the preacher’s wife came afield to flowering 
welcomes, a tragedy which sensitive souls carry in 
the hidden chambers of memory has been enacted. 
The Forgotten Princess of the pastorium and the 
silent Lord alone know the bruise of the preacher’s 
heart. One night he comes trudging home trailing 
tired feet through the white blowing storm, and 
that program of advance, that challenge to a new 
charge, and that enthusiasm of an idealist just 
finding himself, which the preacher has presented 
to an ill-understanding “ board ” of his men— 
these plans and hopes are like the preacher’s broken 
spirit, all withered and smiled away. Stung and 
bleeding, he reveals to the preacher’s wife the pano¬ 
rama of his defeat. His words are slow and his 
voice is quivering, for he doubts whether even she 
will understand how slow of heart are the sons of 
the kingdom to see. He need not to have doubted, 


132 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


for in ready and unaffected sentences of thrilling 
confidence the preacher’s wife has reanimated the 
breath of an expiring faith, and the gentle, glow¬ 
ing secret of the Lord which she now possesses has 
been breathed out like the atmosphere of some heal¬ 
ing balm. The preacher’s soul is still again and 
stayed. Then the preacher and the tranquil 
preacher’s wife fold their broken wings about each 
the other, and under the shadow of the care of the 
Almighty who never slumbers,—they fall asleep. 

Days of victory come at last to the preacher. He 
thrills with a mighty sense that the God of our 
fathers has chosen him to mould and remake the 
lives of many of the sons of men. New powers 
flash out of his growing years, enthralling passions 
for his ministry to men seize upon him, and the 
preacher is swept along in the career of a success¬ 
ful pastorate to the tune of stirring trumpets. Men 
whisper his name. Great churches seek him for 
their preacher. Stories of his picturesque achieve¬ 
ments appear on the printed page. Platforms in¬ 
vite him. Schools delight to honour him. Gifts 
make him rich. Plowers are strewn all the day 
along his winding lane and they scent even the 
hedges of his life. And so he has come into his 
day, and all the world is a joy, and a glory and a 
triumph to the preacher. He has reached the peri¬ 
helion of his career, and the world is lighted with 
his sun. But the Princess is forgotten to the 
printed page. Her name is unmentioned by the 


THE FORGOTTEN PRINCESS 


133 


praise of lips, and she is little worshipped even by 
the successful preacher’s flock. Hers is the task of 
changing the linen spread of the bed on which the 
preacher rests. Now she is warming the com¬ 
fortable to be thrown upon him as he has fallen all 
of a sudden into a mid-day nap. She is selecting 
his wholesome food, keeping her hand on the pulse 
of his daily activities, watching lest he he lured into 
the error of overwork. She is the strange, mysteri¬ 
ous supply that keeps his life radiant with a dis¬ 
guised winsomeness. Hers is the lustre that makes 
the golden glow of his sunlighted life. Hers is the 
hand that kept him strong all along the way. 

The Princess and the Palm Trees 

Led to a sacred burial by angel hands, never 
granted to another mortal, Moses climbs to Pisgah’s 
heights to view before him the Land of Promise, 
and at his feet lies Jericho, the City of the Palm 
Trees. The waving of the palm trees in the valley 
is ever the symbol of triumph and victory to Moses 
as he waits the sighing of the dead march by the 
orchestration of the sweeping winds! Surely the 
palm trees suggest the Princess and the floating ark 
and the wailing baby—certainly to Moses, awaiting 
angels, came the memory of the Forgotten Princess 
of the Nile. 

To you, Mighty Moses, soon cometh the valiant 
victory and the shining crown, hut to the Princess 
is the triumph of the tranquil palms! 


134 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


I think one of the grayest mornings I have ever 
known came after the unsullied victory of the death 
of my gentle father, for fifty years a preacher of 
Jesus. I left his fallen form to seek the house 
of his gentlest of life’s companions—the preacher’s 
wife. I came into her room, and saw the moaning 
spirit and the trammelled soul broken, but silently 
lighted with an unvanquished hope that looked 
through the open windows to the other world. Here 
was the preacher’s wife, silent, sighing, and some¬ 
times sobbing for the start of the caravan that 
should bear her over the desert just beyond which 
lay the city of those who conquer. As the cortege 
left the house of the preacher’s invalid wife she 
waved her hand and cried gently, “ Good-bye, good 
heart, I shall be coming soon.” And then in after 
years the caravan came. 

Side by side they lie. The good preacher and 
the preacher’s good wife. Over them stands a 
granite shaft, built to keep the preacher’s memory 
in the soul of the city he served, and on the tender 
green grass which covers her grave lie two branches 
of trailing palm leaves. And hers, as his, is now 
the victory and the crown and the triumph of the 
trailing palms. 


XIII 


THE HIDDEX HOST 

“ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of tho 
heavenly host.” —Luke 2:13. 

P RAYER has its surprises, even as it must 
have its patience. One angel of God was 
not sufficient for the startled shepherds on 
the still plains of Bethlehem; this lone angel 
brought only fear, mingled with their panic; hut 
when suddenly a multitude of the angelic host 
appeared, singing a heavenly processional, the 
shepherds rediscovered their lost confidence and 
turn with a stalwart faith toward the birthplace 
of Jesus. 

This Christmas story is ever a charming one be¬ 
cause the glory of angels is its background. The 
light of heaven streams through its beauty and sim¬ 
plicity. The shepherds were rugged, simple men 
guarding their sheep on a calm night in the mild 
December of Palestine. They were doubtless of 
the Pharisee sect, for they believed in the appear¬ 
ance of angels. They were, maybe, holding mid¬ 
night councils, discussing the hordes that in those 
days were pouring along every road of Palestine 

toward Jerusalem, responding to the call of Augus- 

135 


136 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


tus to be enrolled. There was here and there 
among them a sign of sorrow that Israel was under 
the yoke. The freedom of the stars sang again to 
them the story of the Star out of Jacob. The 
marvelous reign of peace, through the latter few 
years, had brought their memories to recall Isaiah’s 
Prince of Peace. The night had grown old, per¬ 
chance, and the watches were aweary and hope had 
grown cold and the heart was sick as this pic¬ 
turesque group in the silence of the night lazily 
watched their slumbering sheep. The eldest of the 
shepherds began to chant with the quietness of a 
pious worshipper a psalm of faith: 

“ He that keepeth thee will not slumber. 

Behold, he that keepeth Israel 
Will neither slumber nor sleep. 

Jehovah is thy keeper: 

Jehovah is thy shade from thy right hand. 

The sun shall not smite thee by day, 

Nor the moon by night.” 

And the other shepherds were calmed into quiet 
repose, when out of the heavens there flashed a 
light, and an angel of the Lord stood by them. 
They were bewildered, confused, doubtful, and sore 
afraid. And the angel spake to the shepherds, “ Be 
not afraid, there is bora to you this day in the 
city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.” 
But these flock-keepers were stunned, and not a 
sign of faith or response did they utter. They were 
abashed. But suddenly there was with the angel a 
multitude of the heavenly host praising God. Then 


THE HIDDEN HOST 


137 


the memories of Israel’s glory flamed again in the 
shepherds’ hearts, faith returned, and with a full 
confidence they heard the morning song of this 
angel chorus: 

“ Glory to God in the highest, 

And on earth peace among men 
In whom he is well pleased.” 

And when the angels were gone away, they re¬ 
turned to Bethlehem to see these things that were 
told them. 

So the reinforcements of God were there, drawn 
in celestial order just beyond the vision of these 
men, and when staggering doubt had given away 
to a new-born faith then suddenly the multitude of 
the angels appeared, singing of the glory of God 
and the birthday of the world’s new hope. 

The Angel Reserves 

These were the youths of God, these angels; yet 
theirs was an age-long experience in God’s service. 
These were the angels that sped at God’s bidding 
in the marvelous story of Creation. This multi¬ 
tude had seen service on the plains of IJr, as some 
of them had spoken with Abraham. Theirs was 
the dire task of death on the Passover night. They 
had hovered over the armies of Israel and shown 
them the way to victories. They were always in 
the heavens. These angels are watching over us 
in our lonely meditations, singing to us their in¬ 
visible chorus when the heart’s music is mute, en- 


138 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


lightening our dark paths with their unseen glory, 
showing us the way over the uncharted sea of life. 
They sing carols on Christmas morning. They 
stand guarding at the doors of hospitals for the 
sick. The earth and sea and air are their abiding 
places, and these angels are ever waiting to serve 
the bewildered host of men. 

I am sure you and I have been at Dothan with 
Elisha and Gehazhi, his servant, and with dim eyes 
we have seen alone the strength of our enemies. 
Our city has been beleaguered, and the reserves of 
hope have been spent, and faith has waned. In¬ 
deed, God has been forgotten, and in those moments 
some prophet has shown us the reinforcements of 
God drawn in battle line on the hills surrounding 
us, and we have learned, with our eyes of faith 
then unsealed, that u they that be with us are more 
than, they that be with them.” This prophet has 
oftentimes been a humble preacher whose prayer 
has opened our eyes. Oftentimes our own eager 
petitions to God to show us light in darkness, to 
lessen the burdens of our shoulders, or to help us 
overcome in the harassing fray, have been as angels 
to us. Sometimes in the moment of prayer the 
surprise of God’s reinforcements has broken in 
upon us when the night was dark, and the eyes of 
the soul had fallen asleep. 

The story is told of an artist who in the long 
ago found an old Madonna, the finest work of its 
master. The painting was dim with age and ob- 


THE HIDDEN HOST 


139 


scured by dust and marred by the waste band of 
time. Tbe artist with eager zeal, but despondent 
heart, set to retouching and re-illuminating and re¬ 
storing the beauties of the masterpiece. What 
seemed to his eyes to be a great arch of clouds had 
circled the quiet splendour of the Child and Mother 
and Father, but as deftly he discerned the faded 
colours and as skillfully he restored them, suddenly 
the arch of clouds proved to be a chorus of 
cherubim and seraphim, guarding with care the 
birth of Jesus in the lowly manger. That old-time 
story is the every-day story of these lives of ours. 
What seem to be overhanging clouds, about to break 
with menace and with frown on their billowy faces, 
are really the invisible reinforcements of God, 
which when the heart has yearned and the eyes have 
struggled to see appear as the messengers of God 
singing to us their songs of light and love. 

The Light at Midnight 
Now, one of the human elements about this 
Christmas story of the shepherds and the angels, 
lies in the fact that the angels came in the night; 
the reinforcements came when the faith had begun 
to wane. Certainly this was true of the world at 
that time. Socrates and Plato had led the people 
into such intellectual mazes that they were unsatis¬ 
fied with the gods of Greece, and yet could not see 
the end of the way. They could discern the light 
of immortality shining on a far-off shore, but there 


140 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


was no pilot to steer them over the wide, unknown 
sea. When Jesus brought immortality to light, this 
was the reinforcement of God called into the night 
of the world’s restless faith. Israel was decadent 
at the time these angels sang. Now and then a 
noble-spirited Simeon waited for the consolation of 
Israel, but the heavens were arched to Israel with 
a cloud impenetrable. The ways of God to them 
were disappointing, and they were a hapless, hope¬ 
less people, watching at their humdrum tasks in the 
night. And then the Messiah came. Too long were 
they in finding it out, but the reinforcements of 
God came at the despairing call of receding faith. 
So the shepherds watched, I am sure, far into the 
obscure night, and were waiting now for the break, 
as one on a bed of fever waits for the glory of the 
Lord in the morning. Doubtful, disconsolate, 
dreary at heart, these shepherds watched their 
flocks by night, and then the angel came, but they 
were only frightened, and then the multitude of 
the heavenly host, God’s reinforcements, filled the 
vast heavens with song ? and the shepherds were 
summoned to take heart. A light broke upon them, 
and faith led them by the hand to the cradle of the 
Christ. 

Just so did Lord Alfred Tennyson come into the 
vision of the hidden reserves that flashed into his 
noble mind the full glory of God. Leaving Cam¬ 
bridge at twenty-three, he joined himself to a small 
family party to travel on the Continent. In the 


THE HIDDEN HOST 


141 


party was Arthur Hallam, his dear friend, whom 
Tennyson said was more to him than a brother. At 
Vienna Arthur Hallam died, and for months Ten¬ 
nyson was broken-spirited. Doubt mastered his 
moods; faith reeled under the strong hand of his 
friend’s death. It was night, and the stars had 
begun to fade away one by one. Then God sum¬ 
moned his reserves, and Tennyson wrote his “ In 
Memoriam,” in some respects the finest exhibit of 
a struggling faith, in all verse. In these opening 
lines one may hear the voice of the heavenly host, 
singing a song of triumph: 

Strong Son of God, immortal love 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 

By faith, and faith alone, embrace. 

Believing where we cannot prove; 

Thou will not leave us in the dust; 

Thou madest man, he knows not why; 

He thinks he was not made to die, 

And thou hast made him; thou art just. 

And to you and me out on the silent plains with 
slumbering faith and corroding doubt, the rein¬ 
forcements of God come singing, and we are star¬ 
tled by the multifold surprises of our prayers. 

The Surprising Song 

And suddenly with the angel appeared the multi¬ 
tude of the heavenly host. One of the attractions 
of the stage and fiction and drama , is the element 
of surprise. When one is bewildered by some plot, 
the unexpected or unannounced happening makes 


142 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


the action strong. The old writer of the Proverbs 
says: u It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, 
hut it is the glory of kings to search out a matter.” 
So God has ever thus sounded the bugle note of his 
reinforcements, and the hearts to whose help they 
came have stood abashed, bewildered, often sore 
afraid, as were the shepherds in the Bethlehem 
pastures. The call of Abraham from the land of 
Ur, doubtless came through Abraham’s searching 
after God, but how great was the surprise of God’s 
call. And Moses aspiring to a nearer fellowship 
prays, and how is he surprised by the voice of God, 
calling him to lead Israel. David, in lonely nights 
the son of God’s close companionship, prays out in 
the open fields, and how is he surprised when God 
in his own way answered his yearning soul. And 
witness Saul hiding away from the reinforcements 
of God, and yet through the years he had longed to 
have God’s mighty strength. It is a rebuke to 
faith that the shepherds were sore afraid when 
their aspirations were fulfilled. How overjoyed 
often is the modem saint who has cried out, night 
after night through the years, perchance in prayer 
to God. Suddenly out of the dullness of life, the 
light of a messenger bearing God’s thought shines 
upon us. We are startled. Our ecstasy knows no 
bounds. The prayer of years and years is answered 
so strangely and of a sudden. A preacher is lead¬ 
ing a people, and some day into the drought and 
dryness, the unfruitfulness and failures of a pas- 


THE HIDDEN HOST 


143 


torate, the tide of the Spirit pours its beneficent 
waters of refreshing, and the channels are swept 
clean, and the lush and luxuriance of the summer 
grows its fruitage in all the hearts of men. He is 
surprised that God has suddenly sent his re¬ 
serves. 

I have often thought how human was the experi¬ 
ence of Christian and Hopeful in the dungeon of 
Giant Despair. Lost, beaten, bruised, prisoners of 
Despair, they spend the night in prayer, and lo, the 
surprise of the morning! The Key of Promise, 
like a mighty reinforcement, was hidden away in 
the folds of their garments, and suddenly they had 
found the way to faith and to the new path that led 
to the City Celestial. The reinforcements of God 
had come suddenly. When Jesus comes with the 
holy angels, we know not the hour nor the time, but 
we know His coming will be as the thief in the 
night. It will be at an hour when we think not, 
but His coming will have the glory of surprise 
about it. Perchance it will be when the world has 
gone to sleep, sleeping from sorrow over its tasks 
and toils, its tumults and tragedies. It may be 
when the night is obscure, and the commonplace 
duty of a sheep-tender has fallen to be our lot. 
Suddenly, when the music of life is muffled, the 
hills will glow with a light ineffable, and the King, 
in company with the glory of the angels, will come 
to sit on the throne of His glory. These are the 
reinforcements of God, and evil shall be no more, 


144 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, 
and the confusion of the night shall have passed 
forever away. And this is the story of the angels 
on the first Christmas. These shining reserves of 
God are all about us. Let us watch that we are 
unembarrassed by their nearness, unabashed when 
they appear. They will come to us just at the mo¬ 
ment when our faith is faltering, and they will 
come suddenly, and the glory of surprise will be 
hidden away in the song they sing, when the ob¬ 
scure morning lifts its gates to let in the Silver 
Day. 


XIV 


THE SURVIVAL OF THE UXSEEX 

“Thy walls are continually before me ”— Isaiah 49:16. 

T HE most important question that comes up 
again and again for us to answer on this 
last day in the old year is, “What experi¬ 
ences of the departing year are going to survive 
into the next year ? ” Certainly the things that 
were seen by the inner eye will survive long after 
the pictures of sense have faded, and the songs 
which the soul heard will linger when the natural 
ear has forgotten the harsh songs of sound, and the 
glory of the unseen will go shining into the next 
year when the glamour of the seen is tarnished and 
tawdry. The experiences of the old year which 
survive into the new are the experiences that have 
passed through the eyes of the soul. 

The prophet Isaiah in this text presents to us a 
parable of the Hebrew people. They were a cap¬ 
tive nation in Babylon, the Magnificent, and Jeru¬ 
salem was in ruins, wasted and decadent, yet Isaiah 
saw the glory of the Unseen City. He saw the 
walls rebuilded, the city rehabilitated, and his 
vision was the vision of the Hew Jerusalem. He 

could hear the rattle of the prisoner’s chains that 

145 


146 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


bound bis people while be spoke of a nation that 
should be free. He dwelt in the midst of a people 
desolate, discouraged and disconsolate, but his mind 
was fixed on the victorious Israel, and Israel’s God. 
Israel needed this stalwart prophet to fling back to 
them this message to “ Return,” for during this 
more than fifty years Israel had grown into the 
habit of captivity and the indolence of despair. 

Henceforth, faith should take the place of sight 
with them. The king had promised them the free¬ 
dom to return and the prophet had thrilled them 
with the image of the new city. Henceforth, these 
toiling captives shall not be the children of despair; 
they shall not longer linger with the home-sickness 
of the exile, they shall now revel in the glory of the 
City Unseen; they shall henceforth dream of the 
fallen city rebuilded by hands invisible and divine. 
No more shall they hang their silent harps by night 
on the willows, but they shall live in the imagina¬ 
tion of that choir invisible, whose music celestial 
would roll about the throne of the New Zion. 

The Glory of the Unseeh City 

The message of this ancient text is the glory of 
seeing walls rise out of wreckage, the faith to pro¬ 
ject one’s prayers and dreams into deeds and duties. 
The facts tell the story of walls fallen; faith tells 
the story of walls rebuilt. The dead weights of this 
age would crush us did not the soul of man live 
by faith. “ After all,” says Tertullian, “ most of 


THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNSEEN 147 

« 

mankind have seen God through visions/’ The 
best in revelation and the best in the world’s 
achievement have come from the minds of men who 
dream. From the rapt Isaiah and the singing 
David and the vision-seeing Paul, have come the 
greatest secrets of God. These Jews were anxious 
to travel and toil on the journey over the deserts to 
Jerusalem, hut the one thing necessary first of all, 
was the vision of confidence in the Builder of the 
walls. You and I have heard the fussy, wheezing, 
noisy gas engine as it turned the wheels of the 
coffee mill in the corner grocery, and yet how 
majestic was the impression of power that awed us 
as we looked upon some giant fly-wheel turning ma¬ 
chinery of thirty thousand horsepower with no 
sound, no flurry, as with silent power it drove the 
water of the reservoirs to every home in the great 
city. Jesus never paid a finer tribute to the soul 
of man than when, under the stress of Satan’s 
temptation, He spake that wonderful word, “ Man 
shall not live by bread alone, hut by every word 
that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” “ Man 
is a heavenly plant,” says Plato, “ not earthly.” 
The spirit of our age is the feverish fancy to he 
rich, to rise a step or two in the social scale, hut 
after all is won that the heart has craved the pure 
soul of man sighs after God. The busy social 
worker, with his clubs and guilds and schemes and 
institutions, is certainly of great value to our age, 
but there is danger in the cry that we can make this 


148 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


earth a heaven here and now, for this wall will 
never be done until man has learned to revel in the 
dreams of glory of that city whose foundation is 
laid and whose maker and builder is God. The 
glory of the Unseen Holy City gives to man the 
zest for toiling to make his own city holy. 

A few years ago a friend of mine was talking 
with the richest man in Canada. After the busi¬ 
ness transaction was closed the sad-voiced Canadian 
said, “ Mr. Stone, are you married ? ” “ Yes/’ 

said Mr. Stone, “ and why? ” “ Because,” he said, 
“ last week I buried my wife, but I lost her fifteen 
years ago. Fifteen years ago I made up my mind 
to be the richest man in Canada, and I have real¬ 
ized my dream, but I lost my wife, who was better 
than money. When I became so engrossed in busi¬ 
ness I forgot the best things, the little courtesies of 
home life, the quiet, thoughtful things which one 
who loves delights to do; I forgot to buy little 
presents for my wife; the song was silent in my 
life, and I was crowded with so many busy details 
that her heart was broken and her spirit was 
crushed. I buried her last week, but I lost her 
fifteen years ago. Mr. Stone, go back home and 
give your best love to your home.” That is the 
story always at the end. One finds that “ money 
is the universal provider of everything but happi¬ 
ness, and the universal passport to every place but 
Heaven.” 

When I go to the city of the silent dead, where 


THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNSEEN 149 


branches of palm lie trailing over the grave of my 
own dear mother, I know there’s something in this 
life better than gold. I am dissatisfied with Baby¬ 
lon and its fine garments, its clatter and hurry, and 
prosperity and gaudy power, I sigh for the city 
whose walls are continually before me. Man’s 
supreme quest is for happiness and Heaven and 
faith and truth and God. And we are restless 
creatures until we rest in Him. 

To the religious sense of the Twentieth Century 
man, even as to the Jew of the captivity, the power 
of believing without seeing, and of living as 
actually possessing ideals unrealized, is the power 
that survives from the old year to the new, and 
from the mortal life to the eternal. 

The Spirit Grows Large in its Dreams 

To lose the power of dreaming of the unseen is 
to lose the power of acquiring anything in life 
worth the while. Faith is the eagerness of the 
heart yearning to possess its unseen goal. In the 
process of dreaming, of making one’s way to the 
Unseen 'City, the soul learns to enlarge its vision. 
As these jaded and homesick sufferers scanned 
across the desert waste which separate them from 
Jerusalem, they saw not the city with eyes of sense; 
but with clear eyes of faith they could see it. In 
the process of transition, as faith transcends the 
material and earthly and natural to the spiritual 
and ideal, the soul of man enlarges; life holds in- 


150 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


finite demands upon him; all men are at once his 
common brotherhood, and he rejoices in the majesty 
and sovereignty of the privilege of living. The 
crawling caterpillar, seeing but the path it pursues, 
has but a single unit of vision, hut behold the- meta¬ 
morphosis into the butterfly of the summer fields. 
The butterfly has an eye of sixty thousand facets. 
It can see before, behind, upward, downward. And 
so the soul in its spiritual vision sees with amplified 
vision. Henceforth Jerusalem was to be the eter¬ 
nal city, the temple an everlasting house, waters 
were to flow from it, increasing in their daily tide 
of blessing, growing trees were to he on its banks, 
fructifying and refreshing all the land, and its 
leaves should he for the healing of the nation. The 
latter temple was to he the better temple; it was 
to see the glory of the Christ. 

And thus the vision of the Unseen and spiritual 
values of life is transforming the nations come out 
of war. The hordes of pilgrims tracking the deso¬ 
late waste cities are forever to he new men. Trans¬ 
figured, transformed, rehabilitated, regenerated by 
the vision of the glory and heroism of life, they 
never will be the same again. The European War 
has opened the spiritual eyes of the nations to see 
the reality of a world brotherhood and an interna¬ 
tional kinship of men. 

The price paid for this vision is unpurchasable. 
Do not let us think that the lessons which we 
learned this year were purchased lightly. No ideal, 


THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNSEEN 151 


no victory will ever be possessed until we have 
learned to suffer. Do not think this lesson cost 
God nothing. The purchase price is the penalty of 
a tear-wrung heart. The Jews had said: “Jehovah 
has forgotten, God has forsaken us,” and Jehovah, 
wounded at the charge, cried: “ Though a mother 
forsaketh her suckling child, yet will I not forsake 
thee.” And the Jews had come up through much 
tribulation. They were a homeless, heartless nation 
before this new faith was born. They had paid 
dearly for the vision of the new Zion, and so all 
that is worth while in life and love and religion 
is brought with pain and passion. That beneficent 
word, “ to bless,” comes from a word meaning 
blood. “ Sorrow is the great realizer,” said Rob¬ 
ertson, and Jean Paul has put this truth nobly in 
his sentence: “ Wherever a great soul utters its 
thought, there is Golgotha.” Through discipline 
and renunciation we lift the veil of fear from our 
faces to see the Unseen. 

The Survival Values of Service 
The vision of the Unseen, once caught, lures us 
to forget our lives in service. Had the Jews in 
Babylon only seen the vision of the walls unbuilt, 
their vision would have been a vainglorious one. 
Had they beheld the glory of the Unseen City and 
failed to tramp and trudge the long, weary miles 
to Jerusalem to replace each fallen stone and 
to rebuild the wall, they were only visionary. It 


152 


THE SONG AT SUNRISE 


is merely fanciful to dream and not to do. To have 
vision is to possess one’s ideal and project one’s self 
down the vistas of time unswervingly true to the 
vision yet unrealized and the ideal not yet wrought. 
“ To wish and not to will is crime.” To dream and 
not to do is sin. We can never achieve any more 
than what we are. 

The year now drops its curtains and the practical 
duty of new achievement waits the new year at to¬ 
morrow’s dawn. If you have had hut a poor pas¬ 
sion for Jesus Christ, the world’s Saviour, the one 
serene figure midst the world’s tragedies of the past 
year, I call you to a renewed consecration to Him 
and new services to men. Jesus Christ alone can 
fit the nations for their highest duties, and it is by 
serving Him that individuals will be enabled to lift 
up the stricken race, and if no other issue of the 
passing year is kept over into the new year except 
a saving glimpse of the beauteous face of the 
Nazarene, that glimpse will be the issue worth all 
our living. 

Moses, in Midian, had a vision of the luxuriant 
land of Canaan to break upon his God-opened eyes, 
and he followed on until from Nebo’s crest he saw 
it all lying before his mortal eyes. And David in 
his sheepcote marshaled his sheep in battalions like 
the armies of Israel at whose head he hoped some 
day to be. He sung his psalms to the untempled 
hills, as though he sung at the great feasts to the 
praise of Jehovah. Rapt Isaiah saw before he 


THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNSEEN 153 


spoke; Ezekiel preconstructed the temple rebuilt; 
and Zechariah saw a city in which boys and girls 
played in the streets thereof; and so all of them, 
these wise men of God, saw in ways mysteriously 
shrouded from our understanding, yet see they 
surely did, visions of God’s plans and providences, 
and following these stars of vision, they so tri¬ 
umphed over the hearts and hopes of their times 
that each prophecy that they spoke was a finger¬ 
post guiding the next generation which should come 
trudging on to the cradle of the Christ. 

Before we shall see the face of the Father there 
must be faith. 

Before heaven, hope must rise and wing its way 
forever and forever onward until it rests on the 
bosom of God. 


Printed in United States of America 


\ 



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prise hour, hand work, health and habit talks, dramatics 
and pageantry, kindergarten and primary, games and out¬ 
ings, discipline and order, afternoon sessions, the final 
program. The book is concluded with a very good and 
up-to-date bibliography.”— N. W. Christian Advocate, 

IV. E. ATKINSON (Compiler) 

The Value of the Sunday School 

Testimony of Successful Men. $1.00 

It is a matter for genuine satisfaction to have 
brought together, the unanimous tribute of so many 
prominent men concerning the usefulness and high 
incentive of the Sunday-school in later life. The Vice 
President, Governors, Senators, Congressmen, Mayors, 
merchants and other publicists all unite in bearing testi¬ 
mony to the good accomplished and the influence exerted 
by the Sunday School in every walk of life. 








CHURCH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 


WILLIAM ALLEN HARPER 


President Elon College , 
North Carolina 


Reconstructing the Church 


l2mo. 

Dr. Harper solves the problems of _federated and 
community churches, industrialism and social reconstruc¬ 
tion, etc., along lines compatible with the teachings and 
spirit of Jesus. 


PETER AINSLIE. D.D. Editor of “ The Christian 
-—--—■—— Umon Quarterly 

if Not a United Church—What ? 

The Reinicker Lectures at the Protestant Epis¬ 
copal Theological Seminary in Virginia. i2mo. 


The first of a series of Handbooks presenting the pro¬ 
posals of a United Christendom. Dr. Ainslie writes vigor¬ 
ously, yet without heat or partisanship, and presents a 
cogent and lucid plea for the cause that must be answered. 

FRANK L. BROWN Gen'lSec. Worlds. S. Assoc 

— ----—- — 1 A mencan Section 

Plans for Sunday School Evangelism 

i2mo, 

“Here i9 a record of a successful superintendent’s ex¬ 
perience, supplemented by unusual opportunities to ob¬ 
serve how other superintendents and pastors won their 
scholars to Christ. If you buy only one book this year—■ 
let it be this one.”— S . S. Times. 

HOWARD J. GEE 

Methods of Church School 
Administration 

i6mo. 

A Text Book for Community Training Schools and In¬ 
ternational and State Schools of Sunday School Methods. 
Margaret Slattery says: “Practical and adaptable to 
schools of various sizes in either city or country. Will 
meet a long-felt need. I endorse both plan and purpose 
heartily.” 

E. C. KNAPP General Secretary Inland Empire 

■ State Sunday School Association 

The Sunday School Between Sundays 

i 2 mo, 

Mr. Knapp offers a large number of ideas and sug¬ 
gestions, all of which are practical and capable of tangi¬ 
ble realization Pastors, teachers and all other workers 
among folk will find Mr. Knapp’s book of great interest 
and special value. 











BIOGRAPHY 


MINNIE L. CARPENTER 

The Angel Adjutant 

of “Twice-Born Men’* 

Introduction by General Bramwell Booth and 
Foreword by Commander Evangeline Booth. $1.25. 

“The Angel Adjutant” was Staff-Captain Kate Lee, 
one of the most devoted, heroic, and successful officers 
the Salvation Army has even known. The sketch of 
her life and work contained in this volume is a simply- 
told record, yet one aflame with the power and romance 
of evangelism. With a devotion nothing could assuage 
and a courage naught could daunt, Kate Lee fought 
her way to her appointed end. 

MARGARET T. APPLEGARTH 

Author of “Next Door Neighbors 

The Career of a Cobbler 

The Life Story of William Carey. 75c. 

Abandoning the usual biographical methods, Miss 
Applegarth has Vishmuswam, a Hindu, tell the life 
story of William Carey to an incredulous listener. As the 
story is unfolded, the reader catches the spell of Carey’s 
wonderful life as it grips the skeptical Hindu. Miss 
Applegarth’s tale is told in warm, convincing fashion, 
marked by much genuine local color, and charged with 
the glamour of the East. 

HENRY CLAY MORRISON 

Henry Clay Morrison 

The Man and His Message. A Biographical 
Sketch of the Editor of The Pentecostal Herald. 
By Charles F. Wimberly, D.D. $1.50. 

In a volume for which Dr. Morrison’s admirers have 
long waited with expectancy and eagerness, Dr. Wim- 
berley narrates the chief events in the life of a genuine 
moulder of public opinion, a veritable leader of men. 
The figure he portrays in picturesque, yet faithful fash¬ 
ion is that of a notable editor, a fervent believer,_ a 
consecrated preacher of the Gospel, and a Christian 
gentleman. 

DAVID GREGG , D.D. 

A Book of Remembrance 

Selections from the writings of Dr. David 
Gregg. Compiled by Frank Dilnot. $2.00. 

“Many friends, former parishioners, and others who 
knew him not but fell under the influence of his high ex¬ 
ample and felt the touch of his inspiring messages, will be 
glad to have this valuable souvenir of Dr. Gregg and feel 
the presence again of his spirit as they go through its 
pages .”—Christian Advocate. 









THE SECOND COMING 


REV. FRED EUGENE HAGIN Author of " The • 
. .. . " 1 1 Cross in Japan. 


His Appearing and His Kingdom 

A Study of the Second Advent. $ 1 . 75 * 


A careful, comprehensive study of the Second Advent, 
the author maintains the belief that Christ’s Millennial 
Reign is to follow His coming in open glory, a glory 
revealed to the entire irth. Devout students of the 
Bible will welcome this book as a complete, able and 
well-reasoned argument covering the Second Coming of 
the Lord and related matters. 


I. M. HALP EMAN, D.D. 

Ten Sermons on the Second Coming 

A New Edition. $2.50. 

Dr. Cortland Myers says: “Dr. Haldeman is a won¬ 
derful # interpreter of Prophecy. This book will be a 
fountain of inspiration. It will open the eyes of many 
|o a new vision of our Blessed Hope. 


C. F. WIMBERLY 

Author of “Behold the Morning!’* etc. 

The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse 

The Key to the Book of Revelation. $1.25. 

“Dr. C. F. Wimberly teaches the premillennial doc¬ 
trine of Christ’s second coming. The author clearly arrays 
his arguments, and he writes with an enthusiasm which 
can come only from strong convictions on the subject. 
To those who desire a clear and sympathetic treatment 
of what is known as premillennialism we heartily com¬ 
mend Dr. Wimberly’s books.”— Christian Advocate. 


F. L. PIPER , D.D. Editor of "The World’s Crisis 

The Return of Christ 

[The Bible Basis of the Doctrine. $1.25, 

A well-reasoned, balanced review of Bible teaching 
concerning the Second Advent. Beginning with the 
Messianic writing of the Old Testament, Dr. Piper pro¬ 
ceeds to examine the teachings of Christ Himself con¬ 
cerning His coming again to this world, and concludes 
with presenting the testimony of the Epistles and Revela- 
tion to this important doctrine which has always been 
the hope of the Church, 


































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